You will save the Earth by sharing and/or tweeting (corny right?)
Synthetic meat and fish (Is ‘Frankenfish’ the start of a food revolution?, G2, 21 September) could have huge benefits – although there are cheaper and simpler ways to improve food supplies, including better livestock practices, conservation plus careful use, integrated methods, silviculture and using different animals fed more sensibly. These ideas, technology and cutting waste could massively reduce livestock’s impact, but nobody wants the bill while benefits could still be lost.
Even dramatic reductions in human emissions may not stop the climate change trend. Those most at risk won’t benefit from technological advances, and the response to climate refugees approaching richer countries can be imagined. More food from less space doesn’t guarantee more room for wildlife; environmentalists often estimate western lifestyles for all would require at least three fully exploited planets. And it isn’t just burgers: biofuels, other cash crops, mineral extraction, suburban sprawl, dams and other developments could outweigh potential gains. Underlying these concerns are free market idiocies. Resources are looted for short-term gain, having enough is an alien concept and “make more money, buy more stuff” rules. Maybe the world needs to chill in more ways than one.Iain ClimieWhitchurch, Hampshire
Continue reading...No one saw the Labour revolution coming. Not even Jeremy Corbyn. From nowhere new life was breathed into an old party. But with the Tories digging in for a long haul to the next election, next week in Brighton Labour has a choice: to stick or twist.
What makes Corbyn special is that he has stuck with everything he ever believed in. But his strengths are also his weaknesses. We have to remember why social democracy lost its power. Yes, the idea of free markets chimed with a more individualistic age, but a lack of responsiveness and heavy doses of paternalism made state socialism unpopular.
Unlike the top-down social democratic settlement of the last century, 21st-century socialism will be participatory
Continue reading...India was once home to 100,000 rice varieties, but high-yield, less hardy hybrids have taken over encouraging farmers to safeguard more resistant strains
India is rice country: the cereal provides daily sustenance for more than 60% of the population. Half a century ago, it was home to more than 100,000 rice varieties, encompassing a stunning diversity in taste, nutrition, pest-resistance and, crucially in this age of climate change and natural disasters, adaptability to a range of conditions.
Today, much of this biodiversity is irretrievably lost, forced out by the quest for high-yield hybrids and varieties encouraged by government agencies. Such “superior” varieties now cover more than 80% of India’s rice acreage.
Related: Sikkim's organic revolution at risk as local consumers fail to buy into project
Related: Suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers linked to climate change, study claims
Continue reading...A British-led expedition has discovered sizeable chunks of polystyrene lying on remote frozen ice floes in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
The depressing find, only 1,000 miles from the north pole, is the first made in an area that was previously inaccessible to scientists because of sea ice. It is one of the most northerly sightings of such detritus in the world’s oceans, which are increasingly polluted by plastics.
Related: A million bottles a minute: world's plastic binge 'as dangerous as climate change'
Related: Plastic polluted Arctic islands are dumping ground for Gulf Stream
Continue reading...The novelist counts the political cost of hurricanes Harvey and Irma
• ‘Everything is gone’: Americans return to their flooded homes
It had been 12 years, since Katrina, that an Atlantic hurricane of this strength had made landfall on the American mainland.
On 17 August, meteorologists were watching storm formations in the Atlantic. They named one Potential Tropical Cyclone 9. Later that night, they renamed it Tropical Storm Harvey. For the next week, the storm was downgraded to a Tropical Wave, then upgraded to a Tropical Depression. But as it closed in on the coast of Texas, fuelled by warm Gulf of Mexico waters, it grew stronger and was headed for the coast of Texas.
Continue reading...Gideon Mendel photographs the aftermath of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, while Oliver Laughland meets those whose lives have been upturned
• Dave Eggers: ‘As the hurricane bore down, Trump tweeted his excitement’
Terrence Mckeen, 30, mechanic, Black Creek, Florida, with his mother, Gloria Mckeen, 68
I’m most upset about losing my ceramic eagles. They were beautiful and given to me by members of my family
Trump’s got more done than Obama did in eight years. The fact he’s donating $1m of his money shows how generous he is
No matter what we do next, we’re going to have a much simpler life, with fewer material things
Continue reading...Political systems decide what and what not to contest on a partisan basis. Surely Australia can be mature enough to agree on climate change
The word “adhockery”, I am told, was first used around 1890. But this term, which denotes an over-reliance on temporary solutions rather than on consistent, long-term plans deserves a renaissance when it comes to energy policies of the Turnbull government.
Has it really come to this? We are seriously being told that what we need to do is keep open a 50-year-old coal-fired power station for another five years from 2022. And this power station is generally regarded as the least efficient and most rundown we have. We’ve reached a new low point in adhockery.
Related: Coal dinosaurs arguing against the Finkel review clearly don't understand it | Michael Slezak
Continue reading...Decaying notebooks discovered in an abandoned research station contain a treasure trove of tree growth data dating from 1930s
A cache of decaying notebooks found in a crumbling Congo research station has provided unexpected evidence with which to help solve a crucial puzzle – predicting how vegetation will respond to climate change.
Related: We are destroying rainforests so quickly they may be gone in 100 years | John Vidal
Continue reading...Sceptics prefer to reject regulations to combat global warming and remain indifferent to the havoc it will wreak on future generations
From my vantage point outside the glass doors, the sea of grey hair and balding pates had the appearance of a golf society event or an active retirement group. Instead, it was the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s first climate denial group, the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) in Dublin in May. All media were barred from attending.
Its guest speaker was the retired physicist and noted US climate contrarian, Richard Lindzen. His jeremiad against the “narrative of hysteria” on climate change was lapped up by an audience largely composed of male engineers and meteorologists – mostly retired. This demographic profile of attendees at climate denier meetings has been replicated in London, Washington and elsewhere.
Related: How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous
Related: The BBC needs to accept that Nigel Lawson doesn’t exist
Related: Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'
Continue reading...In 1988, when the scientist James Hansen told a senate committee that it was “time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”, those who took him seriously assumed that if they just persisted with emphasising that this terrible fact would eventually destroy us, action would be taken. Instead, the opposite happened: when confronted with the awful reality of climate change, most people tended to retreat into a panglossian vision of the future, or simply didn’t want to hear about it.
Related: Stop talking right now about the threat of climate change. It’s here; it’s happening | Bill McKibben
It may be that if the time for a mass movement is not now, there won’t be one
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