Pit left by fallen tree, lined with cobbles, shows hunter-gatherers’ sophisticated understanding of landscape

Evidence that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were environmentally aware home builders has emerged a mile from Stonehenge – together with a stone age version of the storage heater.

Archaeologists have expressed astonishment at the 6,000-year-old discovery – the stone age equivalent of an eco home – in a heavily wooded spot 15 metres away from the busy A303 in Wiltshire.

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Source: Guardian Environment

As the northern hemisphere slides into winter the southern hemisphere is sliding into summer or, in the case of Australia, diving into summer. On 6 October, Melbourne hit 35°C, breaking records for the hottest start to this month, while Sydney and Adelaide have had a string of days over 30°C.

But for Australians this record-breaking heat is starting to become familiar. A study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters , shows that since 2000 hot record-breaking events on average have outnumbered cold record-breaking events by 12 to one. Climate simulations show this imbalance would not occur under natural climate variability, and that human-caused warming is behind the plethora of hot records.

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Source: Guardian Environment

It’s becoming tiresome hearing government ministers justify their cuts to renewable energy subsidies on the basis that industries must “stand on their own two feet” (Energy minister ‘open-minded’ about UK solar subsidy cuts, 20 October). Energy minister Andrea Leadsom’s assertion that “I don’t think anyone here would advocate an industry that only survives because of a subsidy paid by the billpayer” may sound vaguely reasonable if a) we didn’t have the tricky little problem of climate change to contend with, and b) other energy industries weren’t also subsidised. Your article rightly highlights the enormous subsidies for nuclear, but doesn’t mention those also being given to the fossil fuel industry.

According to the IMF, the UK will spend approximately £26bn on fossil fuel subsidies this year, factoring in new World Health Organisation estimates on harm to health from pollution exposure. By comparison, Department of Energy and Climate Change figures show the cost of supporting renewables in 2014-15 was £3.5bn, expected to rise to £4.3bn in 2015-16. Put another way, every UK citizen pays £412 in fossil fuel subsidies, and just £55 for renewables. How are we ever to wean ourselves off fossil fuels when government policy is so skewed in their favour?
Gwen Harrison
Scientists for Global Responsibility

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Source: Guardian Environment

Green MEPs describe newly minted test procedure, which will allow car manufactures to emit more than twice legal limit of NOx, as scandalous

Carmakers have won delays to a more stringent “real driving emissions” test, which will allow them to belch out more than twice the legal limit of deadly nitrogen oxides (NOx) from 2019 and up to 50% more from 2021.

The introduction of the tests has been delayed by a year by the European commission.

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Source: Guardian Environment

There are widespread forest fires in Indonesia almost every year during the dry season, but this year’s are proving particularly devastating, destroying vast tracts of jungle and blanketing neighbouring countries in toxic smog

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Source: Guardian Environment

Treasury unexpectedly axes incentive for building new renewable energy sources, on top of previously announced subsidy cuts

The government plans to cut tax reliefs for community energy schemes to build new renewable power capacity such as solar and wind in a move that will deal a further blow to the UK’s embattled renewables sector, green campaigners have warned.

The Treasury is to remove tax reliefs of 30% or more for community energy schemes that reduced the risk for investors and encouraged private capital to help build new energy capacity.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Art installation accuses Britain’s largest tuna importer of broken sustainability promises and human rights abuses by parent company

Greenpeace and the TV presenter and environmental campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have launched a protest targeting Britain’s largest tuna importer John West and its parent company Thai Union Frozen Products over the firm’s alleged backtracking on promises to source its fish more sustainably.

A group of around 30 people erected a sculpture of a talking can of tuna fish outside John West’s headquarters in Liverpool early on Wednesday.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Breaking open a locked cabinet belonging to Maxwell Knight, naturalist and spy, yields not Top Secret documents but a passionate scientific plea …

As excitement over Spectre reaches fever-pitch, the last written works of the real-life M have been discovered in a filing cabinet. They too contain a haunting, terrible truth, not about a sinister organisation but the depredations of industry on the world of nature.

The observations contained in a newly-discovered and unpublished manuscript, The Frightened Face of Nature, are the work of one of MI5’s most intriguing and talented employees, Major Charles Henry Maxwell Knight, generally considered to be the original for Ian Fleming’s M. Knight’s life as a second world war spycatcher saw him inter alia penetrate British fascist movements, foil a plot to stop the Americans from entering the war and debilitate Britain’s burgeoning “fifth column” Nazi sympathisers.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Conservationist whose work led to a ban on pesticides such as DDT, and so helped populations of birds of prey to recover

Norman Moore, who has died aged 92, was a gentle giant in the field of wildlife and conservation policies. He emerged into the public arena during the 1960s as leader of a team that highlighted the devastating effects that organochlorine pesticides were having on British wildlife. The revelation eventually led to a ban on pesticides such as DDT, followed by a slow but dramatic recovery in the populations of many animals at the top of the food chain, in particular birds such as peregrines, eagles, red kites and sparrowhawks.

Moore’s team made its findings at the Nature Conservancy’s Monks Wood research laboratory near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where, from 1960, he was head of the toxic chemicals and wildlife division. The team found that dramatic declines in numbers among birds of prey were primarily a result of egg-shell thinning caused by pesticides, and that species were under threat of extermination because their eggs were structurally too weak to survive in the nest.

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Source: Guardian Environment