Reports predict global heating will bring catastrophes and that air conditioning market could grow by 41%
The world is on track for disastrous global heating – but this will create profits for some air conditioning companies, according to forecasts by leading Wall Street financial institutions.
Recent reports by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance all make clear the finance sector considers the Paris climate agreement limiting global temperatures, signed a decade ago by nearly 200 nations, is effectively dead and investors should plan accordingly.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/02/2025 - 12:39
04/02/2025 - 11:24
Buzzing insects may be seen as pests -- but globally, hundreds of fly species migrate over long distances, with major benefits for people and nature, new research shows.
04/02/2025 - 11:00
Hurricane Helene proved a hard truth: a freezer of seeds is the literal version of putting all your eggs in one basket
About a month after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina last fall, Rodger Winn and I met in an Asheville, North Carolina, supermarket parking lot. He’d driven two hours from Little Mountain, South Carolina, where the passing storm had also left its destructive mark.
“When the power finally came back on,” Winn said, “two of my freezers didn’t work.” Winn was worried not about spoiled food inside, but his seed collection. On that autumn day, in an act of forced downsizing and seed philanthropy, Winn handed over two boxes filled with seeds. He wanted me, as founder of the non-profit Utopian Seed Project, to share the seeds with farmers across the region. The boxes contained a trove of Appalachian varieties: speckled field peas, white mountain half-runner beans, purple-podded bush beans and lots of butterbeans.
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04/02/2025 - 10:50
Appeal court finds in favour of anglers who said plans to clean up river were so vague as to be totally ineffectual
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A group of anglers trying to restore the ecosystem of a river have seen off a challenge by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, who claimed that cleaning up the waterway was administratively unworkable.
Reed pursued an appeal against a group of anglers from North Yorkshire, who had won a legal case arguing that the government and the Environment Agency’s plans to clean up the Upper Costa Beck, a former trout stream devastated by sewage pollution and runoff, were so vague they were ineffectual.
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04/02/2025 - 09:00
If Peter Dutton needs to court the crossbench to form minority government after the election, he would risk putting his Coalition partner offside on climate and environment policy
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If the Coalition wins the election, it will face a concerted push from its junior partner, the Nationals, to weaken and even abandon climate initiatives and promote coal as an interim measure in the Coalition’s nuclear power plan.
That would put Peter Dutton and the Liberals between a rock and a hard place should he seek to form a minority government, given that might require the support of environmentally minded crossbenchers.
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04/02/2025 - 06:00
Experts are desperate to analyse rusty patched bumblebee nests for information that might help save them. But they are extremely hard to find – unless you’re a trained conservation canine
Words and photographs by Anne Readel in Somers, Wisconsin
On a summer day in Somers, Wisconsin, Dave Giordano heard an unexpected buzzing in his back yard. What he found shocked him – a rusty patched bumblebee nest. The discovery was so rare it made the local news.
Once widespread across the midwest and eastern US, the rusty patched bumblebee has seen its population plunge by nearly 90%, prompting its listing in 2017 as the first federally endangered bumblebee in the US.
Main image: Two rusty patched bumblebee gynes in the nest discovered by Dave Giordano in August 2023. Below: Jay Watson, a conservation biologist, observes a nest (marked with orange flags) found in a rodent burrow
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04/02/2025 - 01:55
Wild 5.5 metre swells hammer the eastern NSW coastline, causing damage to key walkways and closing beaches
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Locals in Sydney’s east woke on Wednesday to discover some of the city’s most famous beaches and coastal walkways battered and damaged by huge overnight swells.
Bondi, Bronte, Clovelly and Cronulla beaches were among the areas smashed by 5.5 metre swells.
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04/02/2025 - 00:00
A 19th-century zoologist found the ‘little salt dweller’, which could be a portal to the past – if only we could locate it again
Last February, with colleagues Gert and Philipp and my daughter Francesca, I made the long journey to an unremarkable city called Río Cuarto, east of the Argentinian Andes. We went in search of a worm of unusual distinction.
Why a worm? As humans, we naturally love the animals that are most familiar. But from a zoologist’s point of view, the vertebrates, from mammals and birds to frogs and fish, can be seen as variations on a single theme. We all have a head at one end (with skull, eyes and jaws); in the middle, a couple of pairs of limbs (a goldfish’s fins, or your arms and legs); and, holding all this together, a backbone ending in a tail.
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04/02/2025 - 00:00
More than half of Britain’s 59 native species are in long-term decline, UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme finds
Last summer was the fifth worst in nearly half a century for butterflies in Britain, according to the biggest scientific survey of insect populations in the world.
For the first time since scientific recording began in 1976, more than half of Britain’s 59 native species are in long-term decline.
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Greens promise to push government to spend 1% of budget on environment if they hold balance of power
04/01/2025 - 21:31
The minor party makes pledge as Labor faces calls to explain its nature policy and plans for a federal EPA
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The Greens have promised to push the government to boost environment spending to $7.8bn – 1% of the federal budget – next financial year if they hold the balance of power after the election.
The minor party made the pledge as Labor faced calls to explain its nature policy after Anthony Albanese promised he would establish a federal environment protection agency (EPA) if re-elected. The prime minister said it would not be the “same model” as one his government abandoned in this term of parliament after a backlash from Western Australia, but released no details.
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