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Decision to hear Saul Luciano Lliuya’s case against the energy giant is a ‘historic breakthrough with global relevance’, campaigners say

A German court has ruled that it will hear a Peruvian farmer’s case against energy giant RWE over climate change damage in the Andes, a decision labelled by campaigners as a “historic breakthrough”.

Farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya’s case against RWE was “well-founded,” the court in the north-western city of Hamm said on Thursday.

How climate denial blogs misinform so many people with such poor scientific arguments.

The body of evidence supporting human-caused global warming is vast – too vast for climate denial blogs to attack it all. Instead they focus on what a new study published in the journal Bioscience calls “keystone dominoes.” These are individual pieces of evidence that capture peoples’ attention, like polar bears. The authors write:

These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW [human-caused global warming] in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by association.”

Scientific blogs provided convincing evidence that AGW poses a threat to both, whereas most denier blogs did not. Science-based blogs overwhelmingly used the frame of established scientific certainties and supported arguments with the published literature affirming that warming is rapidly reducing seasonal Arctic sea-ice extent and threatening the mid- to longer-term survival of polar bears, whereas those written by deniers did not.

We believe that it is imperative for more scientists to venture beyond the confines of their labs and lecture halls to directly engage with the public and policymakers, as well as more strongly confronting and resisting the well-funded and organized network of AGW denial. This can be done in numerous ways. For example, scientists can be more proactive in approaching the media to emphasize the importance of research findings or to counter misinterpretations. They can also begin to encourage initiatives that empower citizen participation in scientific research, such as citizen science, as is being done currently at several major universities and research institutes. Moreover, scientists need to more effectively use Internet-based social media to their full advantage in order to turn the tide in the battle for public opinion.

Officials at Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, home to the glacier, said such ruptures were rare and had not occurred since the early 1990s

A large iceberg broke off the Grey glacier in southern Chile, authorities said on Tuesday, adding that the cause of the rupture was unclear.

Chile’s Conaf forestry service shared photos on social media of the enormous block of blue-white ice, which measured 350m (1,148ft) long by 380m (1,247ft) wide, as it floated free in waters of a glacial lagoon near the southern tip of the South American continent.

Researchers say ‘source reefs’ could produce larvae and help repair damage by bleaching and starfish

A group of “source” reefs have been identified that could form the basis of a life support system for the Great Barrier Reef, helping repair damage by bleaching, starfish and other disturbances.

Researchers from the University of Queensland, CSIRO, Australian Institute of Marine Science and the University of Sheffield searched the Great Barrier Reef for ideal areas that could potentially produce larvae and support the recovery of other damaged reefs.

Related: Great Barrier Reef coral-breeding program offers 'glimmer of hope'

Related: Fears for Great Barrier Reef as deforestation surges in catchments