Global warming causes some species to become smaller

By Nadeem Badshah

Global warming is causing some bird species to shrink, a study has suggested.

Researchers in Chicago have found that sparrows and thrushes have become smaller over the past four decades. Their wings, however, have become slightly longer.

The findings are based on more than 70,000 birds that were examined after dying from flying into windows since 1978. Body size in all 52 species had been reduced while the wing length increased in 40 of them.

Scientists from Michigan University and early-bird volunteers gathered the carcasses each morning at the foot of buildings in the city. The study, published in Ecology Letters, READ ON

Restoring them to their pre-hunting numbers could capture 1.7 billion tons of CO2 annually

By Katharine Rooney

Whales store huge amounts of CO2. They support the growth of phytoplankton, which stores 40% of all carbon produced. A 1% increase in phytoplankton productivity is equivalent to 2 billion mature trees.

They are majestic, massive and mysterious—and they could hold a secret for combating climate change.

Now, researchers have put a price on the value that whales bring to the world.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated the value of a single great whale at more than $2 million—which comes to more than $1 trillion for the current stock of great whales.

The IMF based its figures on each whale’s contribution to carbon capture, the fishing industry and the whale-watching sector, which is worth over $2 billion. READ ON

To visualize the stakes of the climate emergency, think about the fabled ship: dangerously little time remains to correct course

By Graham Readfearn

When is an emergency really an emergency?

If you’re the captain of the Titanic, approaching a giant iceberg with the potential to sink your ship becomes an emergency only when you realise you might not have enough time to steer a safe course.

And so it is, says Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, when it comes to the climate emergency.

Knowing how long societies have to react to pull the brake on the Earth’s climate and then how long it will take for the ship to slow down is the difference between a climate emergency and a manageable problem.

Rather than being something abstract and open to interpretation, Schellnhuber says the climate emergency is something with clear and calculable risks that you could put into a formula. And so he wrote one. READ ON

The world’s oceans now have more plastic than fish

By John Reynolds

Parts of the ocean have seven times more plastic particles than young fish, according to research.

A study on juvenile, or larval, fish has discovered that they are growing up surrounded by plastic and ingesting it. The affected fish, which scientists studied as they fed on the water’s surface, include a range of species from different ocean habitats.

The study, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and an international team of scientists including from Bangor University, discovered that in some “surface slicks” there were seven times more plastic particles than there were larval fish.

Surface slicks are naturally occurring, ribbon-like, smooth water features at the ocean surface. It is thought that they are a popular location for baby fish because they attract build-ups of plankton, which is an important food source as the larval fish grow. READ ON

A short play about climate change

By Jon Robin Baitz

On August 8, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz—a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (A Fair Country, Other Desert Cities) and the creator of the ABC series Brothers & Sisters—debuted the following one-act at Wake Up! Combating Climate Change, an event produced by the Ojai Playwrights Conference.

Time: Soonish.

An official-looking little room high up in the mountains.

Two chairs on either side of a table. Water pitcher in the center of the table, with ice water and lots of ice. Two glasses. Seated is a plain-looking young woman, MARTA, wearing a Marni-esque summer dress. She READ ON

Backed by big-bucks conservatives, and with deep ties in D.C., the Pacific Legal Foundation is systematically destroying U.S. wildlife protections

By Jimmy Tobias

As political officials at the US Department of the Interior were settling into their new jobs in April 2017, a conservative lawyer named Jonathan Wood started a campaign of emails and calls over a pair of petitions he had filed on behalf of cattle ranchers and business interests.

The petitions asked the department to roll back a key regulation under the Endangered Species Act. The regulation, known as the blanket 4(d) rule, provides threatened species with strong protections, but is also reviled by ranchers, mining interests and developers. Like his clients, Wood, a senior lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), wanted to get rid of it. READ ON

Threatened with death, this professor battles giant corporations setting fire to rare wilderness areas

By Tom Whipple

An Indonesian scientist whose work proves that companies are illegally burning forest to grow the palm oil used in foods and cosmetics has received a British award in recognition of the huge risks he has taken.

Bambang Hero Saharjo, from Bogor Agricultural University, has been sued, threatened and intimidated because of his work identifying the companies behind the fires that ravage what remains of the Indonesian wilderness.

Greenpeace has warned that in buying goods ranging from shampoo to margarine British consumers inadvertently support illegal land clearance. All these products contain palm oil and the charity has linked those of conglomerates such as Unilever and Nestlé to “devastating” fires. READ ON

Venice, its masterpieces, and its gondolas are underwater and floundering

By Tom Kington

When the five-tonne news kiosk that he had worked in for 25 years began to float away, Walter Mutti realised that this was no ordinary Venice flood.

The storm surge overwhelmed his spot alongside the Giudecca canal on Tuesday night as swiftly as it inundated much of the rest of the city and its many cultural treasures.

“At 9.45pm there was no wind, then all of a sudden it started howling and the water rose 10 inches in 20 minutes,” Mr Mutti, 50, said. Fearing he would be trapped in his supposedly flood-proof kiosk, he knew he had to act fast. “As the kiosk started dancing around I scrambled out to save myself and headed home, only to return at 2am to find it had vanished.” READ ON

David Attenborough is beloved in Britain, and, at 93, a global star. Now he’s sounding alarms about the planet. Is he too late?

By Patrick Barkham

In the late 1980s, a meeting was convened at the BBC studios on Whiteladies Road in Bristol. Its participants – mainly amiable former public schoolboys named Mike – discussed the imminent retirement of a grey-haired freelancer, who had been working with the BBC for almost four decades. “We need to think about who is going to take over from David when this series is finished,” a junior producer, Mike Gunton, remembered his boss saying. David Attenborough was nearing 65 and putting the finishing touches to The Trials of Life, the third of his epic series about the natural READ ON

Climate collapse? Who cares! Bill Gates, Oprah, and the rich Chinese fly high. Swedes are getting grounded

By Rupert Neate

Almost 8,000 new private jets are expected to be bought by multinational companies and the super-rich over the next decade, each of which will burn 40 times as much carbon per passenger as regular commercial flights, according to a report by aviation firm Honeywell Aerospace.

About 690 new business jets are expected to take to the skies in 2019, a 9% increase on 2018, as businesses and the wealthy refresh their fleets with new models released by three of the world’s biggest private jet manufacturers.

Despite their huge carbon footprint, demand for new private jets is expected to continue READ ON

Congratulations: your garbage has entered Earth’s fossil record

By Damian Carrington

Plastic pollution is being deposited into the fossil record, research has found, with contamination increasing exponentially since 1945.

Scientists suggest the plastic layers could be used to mark the start of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch in which human activities have come to dominate the planet. They say after the bronze and iron ages, the current period may become known as the plastic age.

The study, the first detailed analysis of the rise in plastic pollution in sediments, examined annual layers off the coast of California back to 1834. They discovered the plastic in the layers mirrors precisely the exponential rise in plastic production over the past 70 years. READ ON

Extinction Rebellion argues that radical, mass nonviolent civil disobedience is the only way to change current climate policies. On October 7, they’re going global

By Alex Bilmes

September’s London Fashion Week began with a bloodbath and ended with a funeral. Both were productions of Extinction Rebellion (XR), a climate-change protest movement with a taste for the dramatic. XR has been stopping the traffic in London and across the U.K.—not metaphorically, or not only metaphorically—since declaring itself at Halloween 2018. Run mostly by volunteers, funded by donations, it has announced October 7 to be the start of an “International Rebellion,” with actions planned in major cities across the world, including New York.

The Fashion Week bloodbath involved protesters wearing sheets stained with fake blood, pouring buckets of red liquid over the pavement to create a “bleeding red carpet” outside the venue for the catwalk shows, while others READ ON

The little-known “third pole,” in Asia’s high peaks, is one of the most ecologically diverse places on Earth

By Gaia Vince

Many moons ago in Tibet, the Second Buddha transformed a fierce nyen (a malevolent mountain demon) into a neri (the holiest protective warrior god) called Khawa Karpo, who took up residence in the sacred mountain bearing his name. Khawa Karpo is the tallest of the Meili mountain range, piercing the sky at 6,740 metres (22,112ft) above sea level. Local Tibetan communities believe that conquering Khawa Karpo is an act of sacrilege and would cause the deity to abandon his mountain home. Nevertheless, there have been several failed attempts by outsiders – the best known by an international team of 17, all of whom died in an avalanche during their ascent on 3 January 1991. After much local petitioning, in 2001 Beijing passed a law banning mountaineering there. READ ON

An epic journey by river and road reveals the horrible price of the Amazon inferno

By Tom Phillips

From afar, it resembles a tornado: an immense grey column shooting thousands of feet upwards from the forest canopy into the Amazonian skies.

Up close it is an inferno: a raging conflagration obliterating yet another stretch of the world’s greatest rainforest as a herd of Nelore cattle looks on in bewilderment.

“It started this morning,” said Valdir Urumon, the chief of an indigenous village in this isolated corner of Rondônia state, as the vast pillar of smoke loomed over his settlement’s palm-thatched homes.

By late afternoon, when the Guardian arrived on the scene, the fire had intensified into a catastrophic blaze, streaking north through a strip of jungle perhaps two miles long. READ ON

In defiance of international restrictions, Japan has resumed commercial whaling. They’ve also wasted no time: as of late August they have killed 150 Bryde’s whales and were on pace to kill more than 50 minke whales by September’s end. As Yoshifumi Kai, head of Japan’s Small-Type Whaling Association, said, “September is the best season, when whales with plenty of fat are caught. I’m looking forward to the hunt.” Japan broke from the International Whaling Commission, a coalition of 87 countries that regulates whaling and conserves populations, after it vetoed their proposal to hunt species “considered abundant.” Conservationists are concerned that Japan’s exit from the I.W.C. may prompt South Korea, Russia, Norway, and Iceland to leave the group as well. READ ON

Scientists record whale songs from the South Pacific

By Rhys Blakely

Just like us, humpback whales succumb to musical fads. Every few years, all the males in one part of the ocean will swap their complex chorus of squeaks and moans for an entirely new one.

This new tune will ripple across the waves, to be adopted by other males separated by thousands of miles — much farther than the song can carry in the water. One humpback melody is displaced by another, much as today’s hit single dislodges yesterday’s No 1.

Until now, how the whales shared their music was a mystery. One theory had suggested it was down to lone troubadour humpbacks who swam between breeding groups, carrying their musical motifs with them. READ ON

Meet the stylish socialites who are making environmentalism chic

By Vassi Chamberlain

A couple of years ago, I was invited to a fund-raising lunch in a surprisingly down-at-the-heels part of London. Rather than a gilt-and-mirrors five-star hotel, which is the norm, the home for this event was a massive ground-level raw space, glass-fronted on all sides. Passersby had a prime view of the 200 women—a standard mix of Gucci, diamonds, and blowouts—seated at long tables. And they weren’t the only spectators: lying on sleeping bags, gawping at the goings-on inside, were three of the city’s homeless. Was that Tom Wolfe I could hear choking with laughter above?

Ah, rich women and philanthropy—what READ ON

Tatiana Schlossberg measures the carbon footprint of everyday life

By Chloe Malle

When Tatiana Schlossberg started writing about climate change for The New York Times science desk, in 2016, people kept asking her for a road map through the often conflicting information about how one’s personal habits harm the environment. Roughly three and a half years later, she is publishing Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have. Given that her subjects include the history of air-conditioning and the complications of coal-ash disposal, her book is a surprisingly readable explanation of how different areas of our daily consumption contribute to the climate crisis.

She examines subjects as wide-ranging as the ecological impact of Bitcoin and how the lithium battery in your iPhone is powered by cobalt mined in unsafe, destructive conditions in Congo. READ ON

Pierre Casiraghi squires teenage eco-warrior Greta Thunberg to New York on his zero-emission boat

By Joy Lo Dico

Such a modern dilemma. You are invited to a climate change conference overseas. How do you travel? If you are going to Google’s Davos-on-Sea in Sicily, as Prince Harry and Leonardo DiCaprio did last week, you take international jets and helicopters, hoping your good intentions will offset your CO2 emissions. If you are Greta Thunberg, you find a prince in a shining carbon-fibre boat to take you.

Next month Thunberg is heading to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York courtesy of Pierre Casiraghi, nephew of Prince Albert of Monaco. A stranger seafaring pair is hard to imagine, READ ON

The Google elite jet-ski their way to saving the Earth

By Stuart Heritage

Our planet is in crisis. The Arctic is burning. The ten hottest years in history have taken place since 2002. Humanity needs to act now if it’s going to stave off disaster. Fortunately, Google is doing exactly that.

As we speak, Google is hosting its annual top-secret Google Camp summit in Sicily. The camp exists to push the boundaries of this puny species and is filled with cerebral discussions informed by the climate emergency: how to design better cities, how to extend human life, how to continue the march of human rights in the face of almost insurmountable opposition. And because this is a summit of the greatest possible importance, Google has chosen to invite only the greatest possible minds. READ ON

A new report, published in the science journal PLOS One, predicts that within 30 years three-quarters of the world’s largest 520 cities will experience near-catastrophic climate change. London could soon be as hot as Barcelona, Paris will feel like drought-starved Canberra, New York could become just as steamy as Virginia Beach, and Singapore will start to suffer conditions unlike any it has seen. READ ON

Forest twice the size of Wyoming destroyed to grow food

By Ben Webster

An area of forest twice the size of the UK has been destroyed since 2010 to create plantations that supply some of the world’s leading food companies, according to a Greenpeace report.

The rate of forest loss has increased since 2016, meaning that pledges by Nestlé, Mondelez and other companies in 2010 to end deforestation by 2020 may not be met, the group said.

Forests in Brazil, Indonesia and African countries in the Congo basin are among the worst affected, with vast areas cleared to create palm oil and soya plantations and grazing for cattle. READ ON