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Pacific islands make last-ditch plea to world before Paris climate change talks

‘Unless the world acts decisively in coming weeks, the Pacific as we know it is doomed,’ says Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama

Amid the rustling palm trees, blissed newlyweds and colourful attire of a tropical island resort, Pacific leaders have been getting blunt with wealthy nations about the unfolding calamity of climate change that is gradually gnawing away their remote idylls.

We in the Pacific are innocent bystanders in the greatest act of folly of any age

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Source: Guardian Environment

Splintered continents help keep a lid on global warming

Every so often Earth’s volcanoes come to life in spectacular fashion. Geologists have uncovered ten of these dramatic magma-spewing episodes to date. At least four are thought to be behind mass extinction events, including Earth’s most devastating extinction at the end of the Permian period around 250 million years ago. But strangely life on Earth sailed through the most recent eruptive episode, around 60 million years ago, seemingly unscathed. Now a new book sheds light on why some volcanic outpourings are so much more catastrophic to life than others.

In The Worst of Times, Paul Wignall, a geologist at the University of Leeds, explores the connection between supercontinents and mass extinctions. At the end of the Permian, Earth’s landmasses were joined into one huge continent, called Pangea. When the volcanoes began to erupt, across what is now Siberia, they spewed out enough lava to cover an area the size of western Europe. The resulting global warming and ocean acidification wiped out 90% of all species. By contrast, the most recent outpouring of lava, in the North Atlantic around 60 million years ago, caused some global warming, but failed to bring about a mass extinction event.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Australian insurers keep customers in the dark about climate risks, report finds

A WWF study shows Australian insurers tell customers far less than overseas insurers about the risks climate change could pose to their businesses

Australians are in the dark about the risks climate change poses for the local insurance industry because Australian insurers don’t disclose enough information, a new report claims.

Related: Turnbull government selling Australia short on climate change – Bill Shorten

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Source: Guardian Environment

Los Angeles considers officially 'drought shaming' water violators

City considers new measures against those who use more water than they should, including publicly naming and shaming perpetrators

Drought-stricken Los Angeles is weighing new ways to crack down on residents who use more than their fair share of dwindling water supplies. For the first time in many years, such water hogs could be publicly named in an official version of the increasingly familiar and social-media-driven phenomenon of “drought shaming”.

Related: California drought shaming takes on a class-conscious edge

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Source: Guardian Environment

Joe Henson obituary

Farmer who fought to save rare breeds and educate the public about the importance of maintaining animal diversity

During the 1960s and 1970s most farmers were going headlong down the route of intensive agriculture. But Joe Henson, who has died aged 82, stood out from the crowd. His passionate championing of rare breeds – initially as a lone voice, but later at the head of a thriving national movement – helped to save some famous varieties of farm animals that might otherwise have vanished.

For more than four decades, his farm near Cheltenham, was a haven for unusual breeds of pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, ponies and poultry that helped educate generations of visiting families and schoolchildren about the importance of maintaining diversity among farm animals.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Rescuers free humpback whale trapped in fishing line off California

Teams with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and SeaWorld combine forces to rid animal of most of fishing line

Rescuers on Saturday managed to free a humpback whale that was entangled in hundreds of feet of fishing line, and it swam away southwards.

Related: Rescuers work to free humpback whale from fishing line off California

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Source: Guardian Environment

Labor says Australia must 'tell story of Pacific to world' at Paris climate talks

Climate change impact on Pacific nations is a focus for government and opposition ahead of COP21 where 190 nations will discuss a global climate accord

Australia should “tell the story of the Pacific to the world” when global leaders sit down to climate change talks in Paris at the end of this month, Labor has said.

The impact of climate change on the nations of the Pacific is a focus for both the government and opposition ahead of COP21, where governments of more than 190 nations will gather to discuss a possible new global climate accord.

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Source: Guardian Environment

The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey review – a hymn to flower power

Written with a poet’s eye, this remarkable summation of a lifetime’s study of plants is a rhapsodic labour of love

To vegetate is an odd verb, sometimes even an unpleasant one. But Richard Mabey’s great book is positively fuelled by the curious green energy of its contradictory meanings. To vegetate: to grow and cover the ground, but also to be apparently inactive. The word grafts with its opposite and cleaves to plant life. Take the potato, for example, and the couch potato: the vegetable world is the permanently growing skin of the earth, but it also seems to be just there, covering almost everything but doing almost nothing.

The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination performs around this paradox, exploring its tensions, revelling in its surprises, and urging us to bin any notion we might have of plant life being somehow passive or a static backdrop for the more go-getting life of our planet. Plants, Mabey believes, are more than simply attractive or useful, having “strange existences and unquantifiable powers”, which lend them “alternative solutions to living”. It is not ridiculous, although he says he is “embarrassed” to think of them as having “selves”.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Pacific: The Ocean of the Future by Simon Winchester review – does salvation lie in the world’s ‘dominant entity’?

Simon Winchester argues that our destiny will be dictated by the Pacific’s vast expanses

Will the Pacific save us? In his biography of an ocean, Simon Winchester finds an optimistic note among all the doom we humans trail in our wake. This enormous body of water, which covers roughly a third of the planet’s surface, has become a cistern for our western sins. We have raided its indigenous peoples and animals; our world wars and nuclear tests have contaminated its islands and seas. How does it repay us? By absorbing the heat caused by our excessive burning of fossil fuels, acting as a “gigantic safety valve” to global warming. Archipelagos may be overwhelmed and coral reefs die, but in the end, Winchester intimates, the Earth will survive because of “the dominant entity on the planet” – all 64 million square miles of it.

As a companion to his magisterial Atlantic, Winchester’s Pacific is an equally digressive book, worthy of Herman Melville, and full of wondrous anecdotes that would fuel an entire series of QI. Sikh guards were employed by the British to guard their colonial armouries because their religion forbade smoking. Newly discovered deep-sea vents, where life itself may have begun, recycle all of the planet’s oceanic water every 10 years. All of the continents could fit into this one ocean.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Coalition asks miners and coal seam gas firms to respect farmers' 'moral rights'

Turnbull government ministers say farmers’ right to determine what happens on their land should not be trumped by laws that give companies access

The Coalition government is asking miners and coal seam gas companies to recognise that the “moral right” of farmers to determine what happens on their land overrides companies’ legal right to explore or mine.

Related: Farmers and miners should share revenue in new land rights deal, Liberal elder says

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Source: Guardian Environment