Contrarian climate scientist Roy Spencer summed up the contrarian case for a fossil fuel and tobacco-funded think tank

When I give a presentation and mention the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming, I’m often asked, “what’s the deal with the other 3%?”. These are the publishing climate scientists who argue that something other than humans is responsible for the majority of global warming, although their explanations are often contradictory and don’t withstand scientific scrutiny.

A few months ago, the world’s largest private sector coal company went to court, made its best scientific case against the 97% expert consensus, and lost. One of coal’s expert witnesses was University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer – a controversial figure who once compared those with whom he disagreed to Nazis, and has expressed his love for Fox News.

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Source: Guardian Environment

UK loses third of solar posts as survey reveals almost four in 10 companies are considering leaving market entirely

More than 12,000 solar power jobs have been lost in the past year because of government subsidy cuts, according to the industry.

A third of solar jobs have likely been lost in the UK, found the report by PwC for the Solar Trade Association (STA), based on a survey of 238 companies, around 10% of the industry.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Possums, stoats and other introduced pests to be killed in ‘world-first’ extermination programme unveiled by PM

The New Zealand government has announced a “world-first” project to make the nation predator free by 2050.

The prime minister, John Key, said on Monday it would undertake a radical pest extermination programme – which if successful would be a global first – aiming to wipe out the introduced species of rats, stoats and possums nation-wide in a mere 34 years.

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Source: Guardian Environment

I may have missed British industry’s glory days but I will never tire of seeing our back-of-a-fag-packet ideas ramped up to keep the country ticking over

As I walk from the main plant area to the jetty, the view before me is spectacular. The sun is bursting through the clouds and illuminating a hive of activity, and the contrast between the man-made and the natural is striking. A family of grey seals is lounging by the shore; and alongside, an Indonesian tanker is docked and ready to receive a shipment of product, which our team is pumping through a network of decaying steel pipes built in the 1970s. The Indonesian crew members share jokes with the British workers despite the obvious language barrier. There is a mutual respect and a shared understanding that will always exist between workers sharing a trade and a way of life.

Despite the importance of the reliance on technology and cold logic in the industrial world, it is these daily interactions with people of all different backgrounds and the positive energy that comes from successful collaboration that I like most about my job as an engineer. There is nothing quite like the feeling of reaching the end of a project that you have been grafting over for months and finally seeing the system that you first sketched out with your peers on the back of a fag packet being bolted into position and ramped up for the first time.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Friends of the Earth condemns Coal Authority for granting licences for underground coal gasification at 19 UK sites

Plans to set fire to coal under the seabed at up to 19 sites around the UK would cause significant climate pollution, groundwater contamination and toxic waste, according to a report by environmentalists.

The UK government’s Coal Authority has granted licences for underground coal gasification (UCG) covering more than 1,500 sq km of seabed off north-east and north-west England, Wales and east central Scotland.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Iveragh Peninsula, County Kerry Roadsides are a riot of primary yellow, pinks and purples

This verdant isle is indeed a green gem, but for the visitor from eastern England the abundance of richly coloured flowers is the stand-out botanical feature of the west coast of Ireland.

Roadsides are a riot of primary yellow – bird’s foot trefoil, St John’s wort, ragwort and cat’s ear; pinks and purples – including common, bell and cross-leaved heather and whole hedges of fuchsia; whitish umbels of angelica, and big white and pink striped, flared trumpets of the roseata subspecies of large bindweed.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Solar energy, no sodium and organic fertiliser: how one of Australia’s biggest wineries is reducing waste while saving money and energy

One of Australia’s biggest family-owned wineries wants to become the country’s first zero-waste wine producer, and has invested more than $15m to achieve this goal.

De Bortoli Wines, which has wineries at four sites in two states, has already cut the amount of waste it disposes to landfill from 300 tonnes a year to 48 tonnes as part of a long-term sustainable business plan adopted in 2004.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 28 July 1916

The ragwort is out on the sandhills, masses of handsome flowers above dense, dark green leaves, except where a colony of black and orange cinnabar caterpillars is defoliating the strong plants. Brighter even than the ragwort is the yellow-wort, each flower facing the sun above its stem-pierced leaves. Acres are plentifully sprinkled with yellow-worts, pink centauries, marsh helleborines with nodding mauve or purple white-lipped flowers, and grass of Parnassus with elegant white flowers delicately veined with grey. On the level stretches are considerable areas of solid pink, paler but more dainty than that of the centaury, for the small, short-stalked flowers of the bog pimpernel grow so close together as to hide their creeping leaves.

Over this floral wilderness a few terns still call harshly, for belated pairs, their earlier efforts having failed, yet hope to hatch their two or three mottled eggs. When, one day this week, we left the sandhills, we found scores of adult birds resting on the sands, and others offering small shining fish to the young they had tempted towards the sea; over the water beyond were many more beating up and down, hovering and diving. Suddenly, from the dunes behind, came a wild, angry clamour, and an Arctic skua, big and brown beside the dainty terns, came skimming towards the beach. Two or three irate terns followed it, and the resting birds on the shore got up in a flurried cloud. Heedless of this noisy multitude and their mobbing cries it singled out one with food in its coral bill and, twisting and dodging from side to side, chased it until the quarry was dropped. Had we been near enough we might have seen the skua stoop try catch the dropped fish before it reached the water, for that is the constant habit of this fierce aerial highway robber.

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Source: Guardian Environment

A fish familiar to Mediterranean fishermen can now be caught around Britain, from the south-west to the Hebrides

A favourite haunt of a newcomer to British shores, the grey triggerfish Balistes capriscus, is the seaside pier. For the holiday angler it could be quite a shock landing such an unfamiliar fish, and it will need caution. Triggerfish have small mouths but eight sharp teeth and strong jaws, useful for crushing the shells of mussels and other prey.

The increase in sea temperatures of around 1C in the last 30 years, caused by climate change, has attracted this and other newcomers more familiar to fishermen in Mediterranean countries. Unlike the octopus, which still seems confined to the southern half of Britain and Ireland, the grey triggerfish is moving north quite fast.

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Source: Guardian Environment