-
Judgment in The Hague orders Netherlands to do more to protect Caribbean people in its territory from impacts of climate crisis
The Dutch government discriminated against people in one of its most vulnerable territories by not helping them adapt to climate change, a court has found.
The judgment, announced on Wednesday in The Hague, chastises the Netherlands for treating people on the island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean, differently to inhabitants of the European part of the country and for not doing its fair share to cut national emissions.
Continue reading...
-
Light scattering creates the shade we see when we look skyward, and studies show the process varies around the world
On holiday the sky may look a deeper shade of blue than even the clearest summer day at home. Some places, including Cape Town in South Africa and Briançon in France, pride themselves on the blueness of their skies. But is there really any difference?
The blue of the sky is the product of Rayleigh scattering, which affects light more at the blue end of the spectrum. The blue we see is just the blue component of scattered white sunlight.
Continue reading...
-
Everything felt like it was swelling, and despite my diligent consumption of water and Hydralyte, I couldn’t quite escape the persistent, low-level nausea. Even thinking took longer
My mother grew up in Warracknabeal, a speck of a town four hours from Melbourne, Australia, in the wide, wheat country of the Wimmera – that part of Victoria where the sky starts to stretch, where you can see weather happening 100 kilometres away.
Once or twice a year, our family would pack into the rattling old LandCruiser and drive up to visit my grandmother. It can’t always have been blistering weather but my memories of those trips are shot through with summer heat: the peeling paint of my grandmother’s house, the blasted-dry grass of the reserve over the road and its ancient metal monkey bars, so hot they burned your hands. Once, a dust storm blew up while we were there, engulfing the small weatherboard house in howling dirty orange.
Continue reading...
-
People in south-west mop up after Storm Chandra and prepare for next bout of rain, with major incident declared
In the early hours, the Wade family’s boxer puppy began barking. Thinking it needed to be let out, they traipsed downstairs and opened the back door – to be greeted not by their neat garden but an expanse of water.
“It was like a sea out there,” said James Wade. Over the coming hours the water crept into their home on a modern estate in Taunton, forcing James, his wife, Faye, and their three children, six, 11 and 12, out and into emergency accommodation.
Continue reading...
-
Rest of UK has resisted calls to make builders install bricks that provide nesting for swifts and other endangered birds
Swift bricks will be installed in all new buildings in Scotland after the Scottish parliament voted in favour of a law to help endangered cavity-nesting birds.
The Scottish government and MSPs across the parties backed an amendment by Scottish Green Mark Ruskell to make swift bricks mandatory for all new dwellings “where reasonably practical and appropriate”.
Continue reading...
-
Popularity of EVs in country is part of global trend of emerging markets spurning fossil fuel cars at surprising speeds
When Berke Astarcıoğlu bought a BMW i3 in 2016, he was one of just 44 people in a country of 80 million to buy a battery electric vehicle (BEV) that year. By the time he bought a Tesla in 2023, BEVs were no longer a complete oddity in Turkey, making up 7% of new car sales.
Fast-forward two years and electric cars are selling so fast that Turkey has caught up with the EU in its rate of adoption. Its market is now the fourth largest in Europe, behind Germany, the UK and France.
Continue reading...
-
West Dartmoor, Devon: It’s quite normal for greater spotteds to start staking out territories in January, less so on a plastic box near my bedroom window
The electrical junction box, fixed to the top of the roadside telegraph pole, displays a yellow sign that warns “Danger of death”. Not that the bird perched on top seemed the slightest bit concerned – the acoustics are exceptional.
I was first woken one snowy morning early in January to short bursts of drilling outside the window. While I’m familiar with the territorial sounds of woodpeckers in my village, which lies close to the historic landmark of Brentor church, this noise was different. It had the resonance of someone impatiently tapping their fingers on a desktop, with the speed of a marching band snare-drum roll.
Continue reading...
-
Finding herself in charge of her sick husband’s clipper, a self-taught working-class teenager overcame storms, icebergs and a disloyal first mate to get her ship to safety
No one knows exactly what Mary Ann Patten said in September 1856 when she convinced a crew on the verge of mutiny to accept her command as captain. What is known is that Patten, who was 19 and pregnant, was a force to be reckoned with.
After taking the helm from her sick husband in the middle of a ferocious storm off the coast of Cape Horn, the notoriously hazardous tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago off southern Chile, she successfully put down the mutiny and navigated her way to safety through a sea of icebergs.
Continue reading...
-
After debris balls closed Sydney beaches in October 2024, Guardian Australia reported they could be linked to sewage outfalls. Authorities were less keen to talk
Last week, after torrential rain in Sydney, fresh poo balls washed up on the beach at Malabar, the closest beach to the problematic Malabar sewage treatment plant.
Signs were erected on the beach warning people not to touch the “debris balls” or swim. But authorities didn’t let the wider community know. There were no other warnings issued by Sydney Water, the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) or the state government.
Continue reading...
-
Funding cuts, conspiracy theories and ‘powder keg’ pine plantations have seen January’s forest fires tear through Chubut in southern Argentina
Lucas Chiappe had known for a long time that the fire was coming. For decades, the environmentalist had warned that replacing native trees in the Andes mountain range with highly flammable foreign pine was a recipe for disaster.
In early January, flames raced down the Pirque hill and edged closer to his home in the Patagonian town of Epuyén, Argentina, where he had lived since the 1970s. Thirty people with six motor pumps fought for hours, hoses stretched for kilometres, but “there was no way”.
Continue reading...
