Latest news

Next best actions are selling your car, avoiding flights and going vegetarian, according to study into true impacts of different green lifestyle choices

The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.

Related: Eat less meat to avoid dangerous global warming, scientists say

Related: How to reduce your carbon footprint #GlobalWarning

Shipping companies are under pressure to phase out use of heavy fuels, as world’s first hybrid battery-powered cruise ship set for launch in 2018

Shipping companies are under pressure to phase out use of heavy fuels ahead of a potential ban on their use in the Arctic in the coming years.

The International Maritime Organisation has approved an environmental review of the use of heavy fuel oil (HFO) by ships in the Arctic. Already banned in Antarctica, HFO is a dense and viscous byproduct of other fuel refining processes.

Related: Why aren't ships using wind-power to cut their climate footprint?

Related: Cruise holidays: who is leading the fleet for sustainable sea travel?

As every greenhouse gas emissions report since June 2014 has shown, the end of the carbon price has led to an increase in emissions. What’s the plan, prime minister?

Last Friday, the Australian government finally released the latest greenhouse gas emissions report, showing emissions have risen in the past year. When excluding emissions from land use, 2016 saw Australia release a record level of CO2 into the atmosphere. It confirms the failure of the government’s environmental policy at a time when electricity prices – despite the absence of a carbon price – continue to rise at levels above inflation.

The government has a history of being scared to release the greenhouse gas reports. Last year it released the March 2016 and June 2016 reports on the Thursday before Christmas – not exactly peak viewing time. It also meant the March report was released nine months after the March quarter had actually finished.

Related: Government held back greenhouse gas emission data for more than a month

Related: Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

The best efforts to undermine the established climate science behind the Endangerment Finding are pathetically bad

As we well know, climate myths are like zombies that never seem to die. It’s only a matter of time before they rise from the dead and threaten to eat our brains. And so here we go again – American conservatives are denying the very existence of global warming.

Here's a histogram of the global land adjustments from NOAA. Also, I'm attaching an image comparing raw and adj global land/ocean temps. pic.twitter.com/BSZXVB9uQw

What they don’t tell you is that the 1980 record in question only comes from around 500 land stations almost entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and does not include any ocean data at all. There is a well-known warm period in the mid-to-high latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere in the 1930s and 1940s, but it does not really show up much in the oceans and not at all in the Southern Hemisphere. As scientists have collected more historical temperature records from around the world in the past 35 years, we have created more complete records that show less warmth in that period simply because they cover more of the planet.

Ultimately all of these comparisons to past records are a bit of a distraction. We have all the raw temperature records today, and we can compare them to the adjusted data to see what, exactly, adjustments do to the temperature record. It turns out that adjustments actually result in less warming over the past century, not more. If we scientists were “cooking the books,” we are doing so in the wrong direction.