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Doyne Farmer says a super-simulator of the global economy would accelerate the transition to a green, clean world
It’s a mind-blowing idea: an economic model of the world in which every company is individually represented, making realistic decisions that change as the economy changes. From this astonishing complexity would emerge forecasts of unprecedented clarity. These would be transformative: no more flying blind into global financial crashes, no more climate policies that fail to shift the dial.
This super simulator could be built for what Prof Doyne Farmer calls the bargain price of $100m, thanks to advances in complexity science and computing power.
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The government has not made enough of a dent in emissions, but global trends and a shambolic opposition offer a rare opportunity to act
There is good news out there, even if it feels like scraps in a world on the brink. Some came last week – with plenty of caveats – when analysts at the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) found coal-fired power generation decreased in both China and India last year.
This is a potentially big shift. Among other things, it exposes the hollowness of arguments in Australia that there is no point doing anything about the climate crisis because the big Asian economies are building endless new coal plants.
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Torcross, Devon: 2026 has been defined by storms here. My job of repairing a thatched roof is simple compared with the wider recovery
During the storm, the waves sounded like bombs going off under the house, Bonni Breeze Lincoln tells me. She lives on the seafront of Torcross, a Devon village that is accustomed to weathering storms, but even she is not used to waves shattering her storm shutters, or sending seawater down the chimney.
I’ve come to Torcross to repair the thatch on Bonni’s roof. Up the ladder, I tie bundles of reed, called “wads”, to pack them into the holes; the thatch is riddled with shingle, fragments of seaweed and even limpet shells. Looking down the seafront to torn up paving slabs and slate roofs that yawn open to the sky, it’s clear that this house – the oldest in the village – has come off comparatively well. The soft, springy nature of thatch allows it to absorb even the impact of breaking waves.
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Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware
The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.
Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.
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The radical project is an attempt to preserve wildlife in one of Europe’s most light-polluted countries, but can they persuade local people they will still feel safe?
Two yellowing street lamps cast a pool of light on the dark road winding into the woods outside Mazée village. This scene is typical for narrow countryside roads in Wallonia in the south of Belgium. “Having lights here is logical,” says André Detournay, 77, who has lived in the village for four decades. “I walk here with my dog and it makes me feel safe and gives me some protection from theft.”
Belgium glows like a Christmas decoration at night, as witnessed from space. It is one of the most light-polluted countries in Europe, with the Milky Way scarcely visible except in the most remote areas.
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Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education
As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.
A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.
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Vast flocks of birds return to Somerset and a rare grebe turns an ordinary walk into something special
After weeks of heavy rain, Cheddar reservoir in Somerset is finally full again – of water, and of birds. Thousands of coots, hundreds of gulls and ducks, and dozens of great crested grebes crowd the surface, some already moulting into their smart breeding plumage, crests and all.
They feed almost constantly, building up energy reserves for the breeding season. Among the throng are some less familiar visitors: a flock of scaup, the males bulkier than the nearby tufted ducks, with pale grey backs that catch the light. Flocks of goosanders dive frequently for food, the colourful males looking like a cormorant in extravagant drag.
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Intricate ice formations can grow on frozen lakes and seas when relatively warm ice is exposed to still air
Intricate fern-like “frost flowers”, said to be painted on windows and windscreens by Jack Frost, are a familiar feature of British winter. In Arctic regions there is an even prettier three-dimensional version.
These frost flowers are typically 3-4cm across and whole gardens of them grow on frozen lakes and seas. Like the window version, they are the result of ice crystals growing in a slow, orderly fashion.
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Emissions have plunged 75% since communist times in the birthplace of big oil – but for some the transition has been brutal
Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.
The sun-lit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.
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US courts, scholars and Democrats are pushing back against the president’s aggressive drive to boost fossil fuels
Donald Trump’s aggressive drive to boost fossil fuels, including dirty coal, coupled with his administration’s moves to roll back wind and solar power, face mounting fire from courts, scholars and Democrats for raising the cost of electricity and worsening the climate crisis.
Four judges, including a Trump appointee, in recent weeks have issued temporary injunctions against interior department moves to halt work on five offshore wind projects in Virginia, New York and New England, which have cost billions of dollars and are far along in development.
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