Environment news

Before and after overfishing

Mona Chalabi — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:21:00 GMT

What do emptier waters look like? This web aquarium shows declining fish populations over the past 100 years - and it uses more than 200 datasets to do it

Mona Chalabi

Sweet chestnut blight – the latest threat

Leo Hickman — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:23:31 GMT

The government is hoping to protect the UK's trees from the many life-threatening diseases and insects that are making their way into Britain. But is there really anything we can do?

Hot on the heels of ash dieback, it seems that sweet chestnuts are now under threat. This week, the UK government announced that it was to ban imports of sweet chestnut saplings from foreign nurseries in an effort to stop the spread of a fungal blight that is already killing chestnuts across Europe and North America and now threatens the UK's estimated 44m specimens. An infection of the blight - known as Cryphonectria parasitica - is usually fatal to sweet chestnuts. It causes a characteristic bright brown cankered bark, in contrast to the greenish colour of normal bark. After it was first detected in North America in the 1930s it went on to kill an estimated 3.5 billion trees within 20 years.

The news comes just months after the government banned the import of ash saplings in the – some say – now forlorn hope of preventing the spread of a fungal disease known as "ash dieback". With other tree diseases also in the news – the oak processionary moth has been detected in the Greater London area and Berkshire – there is a swelling sense that many tree species are facing an existential threat.

Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, this week announced that a national plant health risk register is to be established, following the recommendation of a biosecurity taskforce he had convened in light of the onset of ash dieback. But which trees are next in line for some life-threatening blight? The taskforce's report contains a list of exotically named "potential threats" yet to be detected in the UK, including the "eight-toothed Europe spruce bark beetle", citrus longhorned beetle, red oak borer, oak wilt, pine processionary moth, plane wilt (which has affected 80% of plane trees in some parts of France), pine pitch canker and brown spot needle blight. And what elms still remain in the UK could be finished off by the zigzag elm sawfly, which has "spread quickly" from Asia into continental Europe.

"There are a variety of pests and diseases already in the UK and many more on the continent heading our way, but the biggest threat to UK trees could be one we don't currently know about," says Austin Brady, head of conservation at the Woodland Trust. "It's hard to predict how pests and diseases present elsewhere might behave on reaching the UK. Sudden oak death is a good example of this as it affects oak trees in the US, but it is now spreading via rhododendrons and having a devastating affect on Japanese larch trees in the UK."

Variety is the best defence, says Brady. Identifying and planting a single, seemingly resistant species might prove futile in the long run: "It is important to be vigilant, look after our trees and, when planting, ensure a mix of species is used so that we build resilient landscapes that can withstand future threats."

Leo Hickman

DR Congo waits on funding for Grand Inga

John Vidal — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:44:31 GMT

Complete set of Grand Inga dams on the Congo River would generate a massive 40,000MW of electricity

The dream of harnessing the mighty Congo River with the world's largest set of dams has moved closer, with the World Bank and other financial institutions expected to offer finance and South Africa agreeing to buy half of the power generated.

French, Belgian, Chinese, Brazilian and African engineers have, over 60 years, all hoped to dam the Congo. But decades of civil war, corruption, and the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) reputation as a failed state have limited the hydropower developments at Inga Falls to two relatively small dams, built in 1972 and 1982. These, dubbed Inga 1 and 2, have a theoretical capacity of 1,400MW but produce only about half that.

A new $20bn development to generate a further 4,800MW was announced over the weekend in Paris with work planned to start in October 2015. According to the DRC government, working with European and other consultants, five further stages at Inga Falls could eventually have a capacity of 40,000MW – the equivalent of more than 20 large nuclear power stations.

This would make the complete Grand Inga development the largest hydro project in the world, generating twice as much as the Three Gorges dam in China. In theory, say its backers, it could provide 40% of Africa's electricity needs.

The attraction of developing hydropower on the Congo, says the government, is that unlike most of the world's great dam projects it would not require tens of thousands of people to be relocated, nor would it block the river and result in significant environmental consequences. Because the Congo River around Inga is so vast and falls nearly 100 metres over a short distance, water can be diverted to create a massive new lake without disturbing its main flow.

"The impact on land use is very limited. The development can be progressive and carried out in a series of further phases, eventually providing 40,000MW of power," says the technical data for the proposed development.

The African Development Bank, World Bank, French Development Agency, European Investment Bank and Development Bank of South Africa have all shown interest in financing the next stage of the project. No developer has been chosen but Chinese, Korean and Spanish companies are said to be in the forefront.

Key to the project is South Africa's commitment this week to buy 2,500MW of capacity. "We have affirmed our commitment to the project by already provisioning for this purchase in our budgetary plan," said South Africa Ministry of Energy official, Garrith Bezuidenhoudt.

But the prospect of the local population getting power from Inga in the next 20 years is remote. Less than 10% of the population currently has electricity, with nearly all Inga 1 and 2 power going directly to multinational mining companies in the Katanga "copper belt". It is expected most Inga 3 power would travel 1,500 miles to power-hungry South Africa or large mines in Congo.

Giant hydropower schemes in Africa have a bad track record. "Projects such as Inga 1 and 2 have not unleashed economic development, but have been major contributors to African countries' unsustainable debt burden," said US-based International Rivers network which has led opposition to major dams around the world for 20 years.

In a letter last week to the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, International Rivers and 18 other civil society organisations and networks from Africa, Europe and the United States said the reality of large-scale dams seldom matched their expectations, mostly adding to debt problems and allowing powerful companies to cheaply exploit and export Africa's vast natural resources.

According to the groups, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found that because of the continent's low population density, grid-based electrification, including through large hydropower projects, is not cost-effective for much of rural Sub-Saharan Africa.

"Distributed renewable energy solutions such as wind, solar and micro hydropower projects are much more effective at reaching the rural poor. According to the IEA report, 70% of the world's unelectrified rural areas are best served through mini-grids or off-grid solutions," said the letter.

"In the DRC, the World Bank and other financiers have invested billions of dollars in the construction and rehabilitation of the Inga 1 and 2 hydropower projects and associated transmission lines over the past 40 years. After all this investment, 85% of the electricity in the DRC is consumed by high-voltage users, while only 6-9% of the population has access to electricity. We are concerned that the bank's proposed focus on large hydropower projects will write off electricity access for the majority of Africa's poor."

John Vidal

Matt Ridley has joined the real climate debate

Myles Allen — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:49:51 GMT

The climate sceptic's interpretation of my study as final endorsement of his position means we can move on

It isn't often, as a climate scientist, that you find your research being enthusiastically endorsed by climate sceptic Matt Ridley in the Times. We published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday giving a new best estimate of 1.3C for the warming expected due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time when carbon dioxide levels reach double what they were before the industrial revolution (known as Transient Climate Response, or TCR).

Ridley is excited about this, because he feels it means that until his teenage children reach retirement age, they won't have to worry about global warming. And he is worried that government policies are misguided because they place their faith in climate models, like one of the Met Office models that puts the warming instead at 2.5C, almost twice our estimate.

But no one places their faith in any single climate model, and no one has done so for 20 years. Climate scienitsts are all well aware the Met's model (HadGEM2) is at the top end of the current range. The Met Office's advice to government is based on the range of results from current climate models, not just their own.

The relevant comparison is not with the 2.5C response of one model, but with the average of climate models used by the UN's climate science panel in its upcoming major report, which is 1.8C. Now 1.3C is 30% less than 1.8C, but this is hardly a game changer: at face value, our new findings mean that the changes we had previously expected between now and 2050 might take until 2065 to materialise instead. Then again, they might not: 1.8C is within our range of uncertainty; and natural variability will affect what happens in the 2050s anyway.

Despite this, our study seems to be being enthusiastically cited by Ridley and climate sceptics the world over as final endorsement of their position. If this means their position is that the most likely response is 30% lower than the average of our current models, then perhaps the debate on global temperature is indeed over: 30% is well within the range of uncertainty anyway. But that doesn't mean all debate about climate is over.

Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability? Try explaining to a casino bouncer that it doesn't matter you are using loaded dice because a triple-six is within historic variability – but that is a different story.

Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them; or if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?); or if, like Bjorn Lomborg, you discount future damages to give very little weight to anything that happens after 2065; or if you firmly believe that the "second coming" will occur before 2065 anyway – then there probably isn't much point in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are perfectly coherent ethical positions: they don't happen to be positions that I subscribe to, but if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it.

It is almost inevitable that a debate as acrimonious as this could only end with a firm declaration of victory on all sides. This appears to be what we are seeing. If this means we can move on from a sterile debate about the global response to much more interesting questions about regional impacts, the rights of different generations, and, most interesting of all, what to do about it, that's great. Ridley, welcome to the real climate debate.

Myles Allen

Sweeping across south-east Asia

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:34:46 GMT

Illegal logging and unchecked economic development are taking a devastating toll on forests

In 1968, during the six-month siege of Khe Sanh — one of the most bitterly fought battles of the Vietnam War — a special U.S. Air Force outfit flew defoliation missions. Called the Ranch Handers, their motto was: "Only you can prevent a forest."

They may not have succeeded in their goal, but rapid development in Vietnam and the surrounding nations of the greater Mekong region is on the way to accomplishing what American defoliation missions could not: The widespread destruction of Indochina's forests and the biodiversity they harbor.

Stand on Khe Sanh today, and it's remarkably tranquil. Nearly all the metal from the old Marine base has been scavenged and sold to scrap merchants. The battlefield is now part of a vast green coffee plantation; all that remains of the airstrip that was the lifeline for U.S. Marines and Army soldiers is a length of reddish dirt.

The fate of the forests around Khe Sanh exemplifies what is happening today in Vietnam and the greater Mekong region, which also includes Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Although some large blocks of forest remain intact, the pace of deforestation is dizzying, threatening the region's remarkable biodiversity, which includes more than 1,700 species discovered in the last 15 years alone. Many of the forests in Vietnam have been cut down for the furniture export market and the trees replaced by coffee bushes; in less than 10 years, Vietnam has gone from zero to number two in global coffee production. So much forest has been cleared to feed the growing number of sawmills that loggers have moved across the borders into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, where they are illegally razing forests there.

In addition to widespread, illegal logging, other factors driving this precipitous forest loss include the spread of agriculture in a region with soaring population growth and the construction of dams and other large-scale infrastructure projects.

The scope of the forest loss was highlighted earlier this month by the conservation group WWF, which noted that from 1973, near the end of the Vietnam War, to 2009, the greater Mekong region lost nearly one-third of its remaining forest cover. Vietnam and Thailand suffered the most forest destruction, each losing 43 percent of their forest cover, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by WWF.

WWF concluded that areas of core, undisturbed forest — defined as at least 3.2 square kilometers of pristine woodlands — plunged over the past four decades in Indochina from more than 70 percent to 20 percent. I witnessed this destruction first-hand as I traveled around Vietnam for several months, researching a book on its biodiversity. While hiking near the mountain village of Sa Pa, near the Chinese border, I saw mile-long red clay scars on the sides of the green, tree-covered mountains – the highest in Vietnam. The land was being clear-cut for a controversial new dam, displacing many of the local Dao tribespeople in the process.

In another part of the country, a few hours from Hanoi in the Red River delta, a wildlife biologist and I could see the remnants of famous limestone-rich hills that had been pulverized to feed a nearby cement factory. The factory was located close to the Van Long nature reserve, home to one of the last bands of wild, leaf-eating monkeys known as "Delacour's langurs."

Scientists and conservationists working in Vietnam and surrounding nations say the region now stands at a crossroads. It can allow present rates of deforestation to continue, in which case, WWF says, by 2030 "only 14 percent of the greater Mekong's remaining forests will consist of contiguous habitat capable of sustaining viable populations of many wildlife species." Or Vietnam and its neighbors can take advantage of the natural bounty that remains — forests still cover roughly 50 percent of the region's land area — and choose a more sustainable path that will support reasonable economic development and preserve biodiversity.

The remaining forests in Vietnam are home to what was virtually a "lost world" containing wildlife unknown to the outside — so much biodiversity that for the past 15 years an average of two new species per week have been discovered by scientists. Some of these creatures are spectacular, including the Javan rhino, barking deer, fishing cat, ferret-badger, finless porpoise, Irrawaddy dolphin, giant Mekong catfish, and a creature called the saola, which looks like a goat but is genetically closer to an ox.

One University of Hanoi biologist, Vo Quy, eminence grise of Indochina conservation, is convinced that many other creatures are still waiting to be found. "Local people are always finding things that we scientists don't know about," he said to me.

But things are changing swiftly in Vietnam, which — at 127,240 square miles — is only a little smaller than Germany. In Vo Quy's words, when it comes to protecting the region's wildlife, "the peace is more dangerous than war."

With the country opening up to the outside world under an economic restructuring in the mid-1990s, Vietnam's economy has been growing by an average of 7 percent a year for the past decade. Like many countries in the region, Vietnam has a young and rapidly growing population, which has expanded by nearly one-third since 1979, reaching nearly 90 million today. (In the region around Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam's first national park and home to many conservation efforts, the average family has 6.7 children.)

As wildlife biologist Alan Rabinowitz, chief executive officer of the conservation organization, Panthera, described the country's rapid development: "Vietnam is a miniature China on amphetamines."

The inner workings of this rapid growth are not pretty, especially if one looks into the furniture export trade, one of the country's top five export earners and a major cause of the deforestation. (The United States is by far Vietnam's biggest furniture market, almost three times larger than the next largest, Japan. Imports from Asia now make up 70 percent of the American furniture market, a 4,000-percent increase in less than ten years.)

Vietnam has even weaker unions and lower wages than China, along with fewer labor laws, heavier subsidies to state-sponsored industries, and bigger tax breaks to favored companies. Consequently, furniture manufacturers in China are already moving their operations from industrial cities near Hong Kong to Vietnam.

While the mills are in Vietnam, about 80 percent of the wood itself comes from neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Much of the timber is cut in protected reserves in those countries — where laws are weak and enforcement is minimal — and illegally smuggled across the border to Vietnam in spite of export restrictions, according to an undercover investigation by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

In a 2008 exposé, the EIA documented the timber industry's severe deforestation of the greater Mekong region.

The organization's field investigators made secret films during undercover visits to furniture factories and found that "criminal networks have now shifted their attention to looting the vanishing forests of Laos."

But because the furniture export trade is worth more $2.4 billion annually to Vietnam alone, authorities turn a blind eye, according to the EIA. Corruption, large and small, has accompanied boom times.

One wildlife biologist, Tilo Nadler, director of the Endangered Primate Rescue Center in Cuc Phuong, witnessed long lines of trucks loaded with tropical hardwood at the Cambodian border, on their way to factories near Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City. Nadler said that even in his area, far from the border, local attitudes toward protection were so bad that a mob had attacked a ranger station three years ago after the rangers had arrested some illegal loggers. Rangers earn little money and have low status, he said.

The impacts of this wholesale devastation are substantial in one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. As the WWF report rightly notes, there have been enormous declines in the range and numbers of several of the region's iconic species, including the tiger, Asian elephant, Irrawaddy dolphin, and saola. Where once there were thousands of saola, now there are hundreds. The population of Asian elephants has dropped from hundreds to dozens. Rangers used to sight tigers roaming Cuc Phuong — which has been cut in two by a highway — but no more. And in 2011, the Javan rhinoceros was confirmed as extinct in Vietnam.

According to Nadler, biologist Vo Quy, WWF, and other experts, time still remains to reverse the runaway deforestation and habitat loss of recent decades and begin better preserving the greater Mekong region's forests and biodiversity. "I'm an optimist, but only if we have real government support to protect our special places," Nadler said. He cited the need to make difficult decisions, which may mean that biologists have to give up resisting a dam such as the one at Sa Pa, in order to save threatened wild lands elsewhere.

WWF said governments in the region need to do a far better job of safeguarding the parks and reserves that already exist since "many protected areas exist in name only." The group also stressed that unless regional government begin to rein in illegal logging and uncontrolled development, "natural forest habitats, along with their resident wildlife, face virtual elimination outside of protected areas."

Although the Vietnamese government has heralded its reforestation efforts, the fact is that they largely consist of monoculture tree plantations that harbor limited biodiversity, scientists say.

A key factor is local community involvement. The Van Long park, for example, was created as a result of local initiatives. Villagers living next to Van Long take a sense of pride in the reserve and have an economic stake in an ecotourism resort being built there.

In Southeast Asia, any long-term, sustainable, conservation projects require popular support; without that, formal edicts or restrictions on timber cutting from the central government mean nothing.

As a popular saying goes in Vietnam: "The decrees of the emperor end at the village gate."

How America became a third world country | Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford for TomDispatch

Mattea Kramer, Jo Comerford — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:15:00 GMT

The politicians who tweeted while America burned are dismantling our society piece by piece with budget cuts

The streets are so much darker now since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury, and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won't graduate from high school.

It's 2023 – this is America a decade years after the federal budget cuts known as sequestration. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 – the moment the cuts began – no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States looking more like a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested – and won – special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568bn to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to US prosperity in the previous century. It was considered a basic part of the social contract and economics 101. As just about everyone knew, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn't adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-WWII years, the country invested great sums in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for "austerity", which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called "deficit reduction". These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on 2 January 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to reason – to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits. As is now common knowledge, they didn't come to their senses. Although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn't that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending – from grants for renewable energy research to disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing – were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for natural disasters, like flooding or a volcanic eruption, began to be shut down. Over time the cuts would be vast: $85bn in the first year and $110bn in each year after that, for more than $1tn in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Once lawmakers wrote sequestration into law they had more than a year to wise up. Yet they did nothing to draft an alternate plan and didn't even start pointing out the imminent havoc until just weeks before the deadline. Then they gave themselves a couple more months – until 1 March 2013 – to work out a deal, which they didn't. All this is, of course, ancient history, but even a decade later, the record of folly is worth reviewing.

If you remember, they tweeted while Rome burned. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for instance, sent out dozens of tweets to say Democrats were responsible: "The president proposed sequester, had 18 mo. to prioritize cuts, and did nothing," he typically wrote, while he no less typically did nothing. For his part, senate majority leader Harry Reid tweeted back: "It's not too late to avert the damaging #sequester cuts, for which an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted." And that became the pattern for a decade of American political gridlock, still unbroken today.

Destruction Begins

The deadline came and went, so the budgetary axe began to fall.

At first, it didn't seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren't quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. There was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all.

They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85bn in reductions, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president's budget proposal for the following year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn't say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment.

As it happened, they didn't have to wait long to find out. The first ripples began to spread quickly. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need.

Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people – people who had access to members of Congress. In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements. Flights left on time – at least until runways cracked and crumbled.

The Pentagon, the military behemoth of planet earth, which in 2013 accounted for 40% of military spending globally and its outlays exceeding the next 10 largest militaries combined, too, wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks.

Meat inspectors, the FAA and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school and doors of opportunity closing. The young, old and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources, such as healthcare or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to streetlights.

And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breached 400 parts per million. (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 350 for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental protection, general research and basic infrastructure meant that the US government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives.

Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it's clear that a rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans – with too little influence – spoke up, and Washington didn't listen. The rest of the story, as you well know, is history.

Mattea Kramer

Jo Comerford

Number of 'excellent' quality UK beaches plummets

Fiona Harvey — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:06:52 GMT

Wet weather, which caused more discharges of raw sewage from the waste water system, is the most likely cause

The proportion of UK beaches classed as "excellent" for the quality of their bathing water has fallen to its lowest level since 2000, new figures show. The number plummeted from 82.8% in 2011 to 58.2% in 2012, according to data released by the European Environment Agency on Tuesday.

Wet weather, which caused more discharges of raw sewage from the waste water system, is the most likely cause. However, storms and severe rain downpours are likely to become more common in the future as climate change takes hold, so the poor results show up the problems with the UK sewerage system. In many cases, outfalls are designed to simply overflow into rivers, beaches and water courses when the sewers are overwhelmed by sudden severe rainfall.

The EEA's bathing quality water surveys encompass both beaches and inland waterways used for bathing, such as rivers, streams and lakes. For 2012, the results of which have only now been compiled, the UK was one of the worst performers in Europe, with 6% of the bathing water tested falling below the European Union standards on contamination, including contamination from sewage and livestock. The UK came in third worst, after only Belgium, 12% of whose bathing sites were not compliant with EU regulation, and the Netherlands, about 7% of whose bathing waters were below par. Some of the UK's failing beaches and bathing sites had to be closed during the summer of 2012, when the UK was hosting the Olympics, featuring a large medal haul in water-based sports.

Across Europe, the pattern of water quality was rather better, with 10 countries achieving excellent quality bathing water, above the EU average, including Cyprus, Malta, Croatia, Germany, Italy and Spain. This represented an improvement overall for 2012, compared with the previous year's results.

Janez Potočnik, the EU commissioner for the environment, said: "It's encouraging to see the quality of European bathing waters continuing to improve. But more remains to be done to ensure all our waters are suitable for bathing and drinking and that our aquatic ecosystems are in good health. Water is a precious resource and we need to put into practice all the necessary measures to protect it in full."

Separately, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign said that 55 beaches in the UK had achieved its "Blue Flag" status, including eight beaches on Thanet in Kent, and four beaches each in the holiday destinations of Poole, Torbay and Bournemouth. A further 113 beaches were granted Seaside Awards, reflecting their quality, cleanliness and facilities. The Isle of Wight gained four blue flag beaches and 13 seaside awards, making it the most awarded region in the country. To be awarded a blue flag, beaches must meet the highest international standards of water quality.

The EEA, Europe's environmental watchdog, has compiled data on bathing water since 1990, and now takes samples at more than 22,000 sites across the EU, as well as non-EU member European countries including Croatia and Switzerland. Levels of bacteria from sewage and livestock form the main measure.

Across the EU sites surveyed by the EEA, about 2% on average were judged to have poor water quality. More than 95% of coastal waters reached the minimum requirements, across Europe, and 81% were rated as excellent.

Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the EEA, said: "From northern fjords to subtropical beaches, Europe is rich in places to cool down in the summer. Today's report demonstrates that bathing water quality is generally very good, but there were still some sites with pollution problems, so we urge people to check the rating of their favourite swimming place."

The EEA said that most countries had improved their storm water overflows, caused when sewers cannot cope with heavy rains, but that they were still a problem in some areas. In the early 1990s, only about 60% of the sites tested had excellent quality water, compared to 78% in 2012. About 70% of sites had met the minimum standards in the early 1990s, compared with 84% last year.

Fiona Harvey

Big-cat sightings: is Britain suffering from mass hysteria?

George Monbiot — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:58:15 GMT

In 1995, government inspectors spent months on Bodmin moor in Cornwall looking for evidence of a 'beast' roaming wild there. They found nothing. Yet every year there are 2,000 similarly spurious big-cat sightings in Britain. What's going on?

The setting was unimprovable. Across the fields, Maiden Castle, a turretted fortress of living rock, clawed at the sky. Beyond it was the village of Wolf's Castle – Casblaidd – distinguished as one of only 20 places in which Owain Glyndwr was born (he died in quite a few as well), and said to be the spot where the last wolf in Wales was killed. Below us a tangled willow carr smothered the valley.

"This gap in the hedge here: that could be where it came through. Then it came down the bank, sauntered across the road and disappeared into the scrub."

I peered into the woods on the other side of the lane. The trees were hooded with ivy. Their mossy trunks sprawled over the ground, or leant on each other, dark-cowled, like drunken friars. Beneath them was an impenetrable thicket of brambles and ferns.

"You wouldn't see him in there, would you?"

"You have no doubt about what it was?"

Michael Disney looked around and shrugged. "It's not an issue for me. I saw what I saw and that's that. People can either believe it or not. I'm not trying to convince anyone."

He had heard the stories, seen pictures in the local paper of the prints found at Princes Gate, a few miles to the other side of Haverfordwest, and had not believed a word of it.

"If I'd been dreaming or thinking about them at the time, it might have been another matter. But it was the last thing on my mind. I was just driving along – and one crosses the road. He was probably about 3ft high and 6ft long. I would say bigger than a medium-sized dog, but definitely not a dog. He was powerful-looking, with a black, glossy, shiny coat, incredibly muscular, like a horse's shoulders."

Michael Disney, former policeman, county council officer, had, to his own astonishment, become one of roughly 2,000 people who see a big cat in the wild in Britain every year.

By the time Michael saw the beast, now known as the Pembrokeshire Panther, there had, according to Wales on Sunday, been 10 "confirmed sightings". Some of those who claimed to have seen it were farmers or farm workers, familiar with the county's less exotic wildlife. Among them were the farmer and – independently – his wife, whose land bordered the lane in which we stood. All described it, as Michael had done, as huge, jet-black and glossy, with a long tail, definitely a cat. One person claimed to have seen it with a lamb in its mouth. It was blamed for the grisly carcasses of sheep and calves found in remote corners of the farms.

But it was only when the former policeman reported it that the beast began to be taken seriously. Three weeks later, when five people saw it at Rudbaxton, the police sent out an armed response unit.

I became certain that Michael is an honest, reliable, unexcitable man who has no interest in publicity – in fact he seemed embarrassed by it. I am certain that, in common with other people who claim to have spotted the Beast, he faithfully described what he saw. I am equally certain that the Pembrokeshire Panther does not exist.

There is scarcely a self-respecting borough in Britain which does not now possess a Beast. Even the London suburbs claim to be infested with big cats: there is a Beast of Barnet, a Beast of Cricklewood, a Crystal Palace Puma and a Sydenham Panther. There have been occasional reports of mysterious British cats throughout history, but over the past few years the sightings have boomed. In her book Mystery Big Cats, Merrily Harpur finds that "cat-flaps", as she calls them, are occurring at the rate of 2,000 to 4,000 a year.

Harpur notes that around three-quarters of all the cats reported are black, and they are commonly described as glossy and muscular. She also makes the fascinating observation that while the most likely candidate is a melanistic leopard (the leopard is the species in which the black form, though rare, occurs most often) she has not been able to find a single account of an ordinary, spotted leopard seen in the wild in Britain.

Some species of large cat are among the shyest and most cunning of all wild animals, but they are creatures of regular habits. They have territories, dens in which cubs are raised, spraying points and scratching posts. They scatter prints, dung and hairs wherever they go: the first are immediately recognisable, the provenance of the second and third can be confirmed by DNA testing.

The 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition was won by a photograph of one of the world's most elusive animals – the snow leopard – taken in one of the world's least accessible places: the Ladakhi Himalayas, 13,000ft above sea level. The photograph did not just document the existence of the leopard: after 13 months of experiments, and hundreds of less satisfactory pictures of his quarry, Steve Winter, through a cunning arrangement of camera traps and lights, eventually produced a perfectly composed portrait. "I knew the animal would come," he reported. His equipment "was just waiting for the actor to walk on stage and break the beam".

Yet, despite camera traps deployed in likely places throughout Britain, despite the best efforts of hundreds of enthusiasts armed with long lenses and thermal imaging equipment, we have yet to see a single unequivocal image captured in this country. Of the photographs and fragments of footage I have seen, around half are evidently domestic cats. Roughly a quarter are cardboard cut-outs, cuddly toys, the result of crude Photoshopping or – as the surrounding vegetation reveals – pictures taken in the tropics. The remainder are so distant and indistinct that they could be anything: dogs, deer, foxes, bin liners, yetis on all fours.

Nor have the tireless efforts to catch or kill these animals yielded anything more convincing. The hundreds of traps set for big cats in Britain have caught only two large predators. One, in 1980, was a tame puma, which had been released by a man about to be sent to prison. The other was a cryptozoologist called Pete Bailey, who had spent 15 years hunting the Beast of Exmoor, entered one of his traps to change the bait and accidentally tripped the mechanism. He was stuck there for two nights, eating the raw meat he had set for the cat, before he was rescued. We hunt the Beast, but the Beast is us.

That is about the extent of it: no photos, no captures, no dung, no corpses (except a couple of skulls, which turned out to have gone feral after they had escaped from a leopardskin rug and a wall trophy), not even a verifiable footprint. The Beasts of Britain have evaded police helicopters and armed response teams (it beats logging car crime), a five-week hunt by the Royal Marines, a succession of big cat experts and bounty hunters and the mass deployment of tracking, attracting and sensing technologies.

In 1995 the government sent investigators to Bodmin moor in Cornwall, where the evidence for big cats was said to be strongest. They spent six months in the field. There is something of the 19th-century royal commission about this investigation. The report contains photos of a strapping fellow with a large moustache and a measuring pole, demonstrating the heights of the natural features on which the creatures were photographed. The text reads in places like the final chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is thorough, exhaustive, and devastating to those who argued that, while other reputed big cats might not exist, the Beast of Bodmin was real.

They examined the famous video sequence, broadcast widely on television, which shows a cat leaping cleanly over a drystone wall. It looks impressive, until you see the man from the ministry standing beside the wall with his pole, and realise that the barrier is knee-high. A monstrous cat sitting on a gatepost shrinks, when the pole arrives, from a yard at the shoulder to a foot. In one case, where the Beast was filmed crossing a field, the investigators brought a black domestic cat to the scene, set it down in the same spot and photographed it from where the video had been taken. The moggie looks slightly bigger than the monster.

The investigators compared a chilling nocturnal close-up of the Beast with a picture of a real black leopard, and spotted an obvious but hitherto-unnoticed problem. The panther in the cage, like all big cats, has round pupils, while the creature in the photograph has vertical slits, a feature confined to smaller species, such as the domestic cat.

They examined plaster casts of footprints taken from the moor. Two were made by a domestic cat; one by a dog. They attended the corpses of sheep that local people insisted had been ripped apart by the Beast. That they had been ripped apart was indisputable; but the villains were crows, badgers, foxes or dogs, and in most cases they had struck after the sheep had died of other causes. The scientists conceded that it was impossible to prove that a big cat did not exist but found no hard evidence to support the story.

I would go a step further: if a breeding population of these animals existed, hard evidence would be abundant and commonplace. Its absence shows that there is no such population. With the possible exception of the very occasional fugitive, the beasts reported by so many sober, upright, reputable people are imaginary.

None of this has made any difference, either to the volume of sightings or to the breathless credulity with which they are reported in the papers. My favourite story, from the Daily Mail, was headlined: "Is this the Beast of Exmoor? Body of mystery animal washes up on beach". It reported that "great fangs jutted from its huge jaw, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Then there was the carcass. Up to 5ft long, powerful chest, and what could be the remains of a tail." The paper interviewed a local police sergeant, who made the cryptic observation that "it almost definitely looks like it could be a Beast of Exmoor". Only at the bottom of the page did the report reveal that it was a putrefying seal.

Beast fever has doubtless been heightened by these stories, but many of those who claim to have seen big cats in Britain also maintain that they had never heard of them before their own encounter. While a few are hoaxers, most report their sightings in good faith. In many cases an animal has been seen by a group of people, all of whom give similar accounts. So what is going on? Why, over the past three decades, have reports of big cats in Britain risen from a few dozen a year to thousands?

There is no discussion of this phenomenon in the scientific literature: I cannot find a single journal article on big-cat sightings. None of the psychologists I have contacted have been able to direct me to anyone studying it. But in his book Paranormality, the psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman tells us this: "Many people think that human observation and memory work like a video recorder or film camera. Nothing could be further from the truth … At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings."

The brain, he says, scans the scene like a torch searching a darkened room. It fills in the gaps, to construct what appears to be a complete image from partial information. We then treat this image as if it were as concrete and definitive as a photograph in an album. If we focus on a cat and not on its surroundings, perhaps the process of singling out the beast magnifies it and shrinks the setting.

I wonder, too, whether there might be a kind of template in our minds in the form of a big cat. As these were once our ancestors' foremost predators, we have a powerful evolutionary interest in recognising them before the conscious mind can process and interpret the image. Perhaps anything that vaguely fits the template triggers the big cat alarm. But none of this explains why big-cat sightings appear to have become more common in recent years.

Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and they appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not always be fully conscious. In Victorian Britain, large numbers of people believed that they were communicating with the dead. Walk around any graveyard of that era and you will read a tragic story of premature loss: ours was a nation in perpetual mourning. The notion that the dead could return in this life must have been almost as comforting as the belief that we would be reunited with them in the afterlife.

As the space race between the US and the Soviet Union gripped the world's imagination, sightings of UFOs and aliens, little known in previous eras, multiplied. This was a period in which we entertained great hopes for the transformative potential of technology. It was also an epoch in which the world was shrinking. The age of terrestrial exploration and encounters with peoples unknown to us was ending; planet Earth was perhaps a less exciting place than it had been. Aliens and their craft filled a gap, while promising that we too would achieve the mastery of technology we ascribed to extraterrestrials. Today, perhaps because our belief in technological deliverance has declined, we hear less about UFOs.

Could it be that illusory big cats also answer an unmet need? As our lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and diversity of nature has declined, could these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?

Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories that must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.

George Monbiot

Oklahoma tornado followed by extreme weather warnings for four states

Suzanne Goldenberg — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:57:09 GMT

Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas told to expect tornadoes, hail storms and thunderstorms on Tuesday
• Oklahoma tornado – live coverage of developments

More than 50 million people across a swathe of the Great Plains states were braced for a second round of extreme weather on Tuesday, from hail storms to tornadoes, after the devastation that was visited on an Oklahoma town on Monday. The storm prediction centre of the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma forecast isolated tornadoes across large parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

"There is obviously more wild weather taking place across the southern plains today," said Tom Kines, a meteorologist at Accuweather. "I suspect it's only going to get worse as the day wears on out there."

Moore, the suburb of Oklahoma City where at least 24 of people were killed on Monday, was unlikely to suffer another tornado, although it was in the path of a line of thunderstorms. South-eastern Oklahoma, central and north-eastern Texas, south-western Arkansas and north-western Louisiana were warned that they were at risk of tornadoes and other severe storms, including hail the size of golf balls, as a severe weather system began making its way out of New Mexico. That included much larger metropolitan areas even than those in the way of the tornado cells on Monday, including the cities of Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio in Texas and Shreveport in Louisiana.

"The tornadoes yesterday were very destructive. They weren't the run of the mill tornadoes. They were as bad as it can get," said Kines. "Today again there is likely to be some large tornadoes like yesterday. Obviously the places that do get hit by them the damage is going to be very bad."

In southern Oklahoma and northern and central Texas, the tornado watch went in effect from 10am until 7pm central time. "Persons in these areas should be on the lookout for threatening weather conditions and listen for later statements and possible warnings," the tornado watch said.

The storm centre said to expect gusts of wind of up to 80mph. Flash-flood warnings were also in effect for parts of Arkansas and Louisiana, with the storm system forecast to dump several inches of rain in a short time frame on Tuesday afternoon. The line of thunderstorms was also forming up into the mid-Mississippi valley.

Residents in a great swathe of the country – more than 50 million people – were advised to monitor radio and television broadcasts for possible storm warnings throughout the day and into Tuesday night.

Suzanne Goldenberg

How can tree stumps improve agricultural productivity?

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:38:51 GMT

Farmer managed natural regeneration can boost agriculture in developing countries, but institutions must adapt for it to work

There's a received wisdom that tree stumps, shoots and bushes should be cleared from a field before planting crops. It seems logical, but the experience of farmers in southern Niger suggests otherwise. There, the practice of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) has been found to significantly improve soil quality and crop yields, along with additional resources and income from tree products.

FMNR takes advantage of living underground root systems of previously cleared trees. Rather than remove new shoots, farmers practicing FMNR will nurture five or so of the strongest, most upright stems, pruning the rest away. These stems are allowed to grow, and some are harvested for firewood and timber.

The presence of shrubs and trees helps fix nitrogen in the soil and lessens wind erosion so that seeds don't blow away and have to be replanted, while falling leaves scattering around fields enrich the soil.

The practice was first introduced in Niger in the 1980s on a small experimental scale in response to widespread drought and land degradation, and a new publication by the World Agroforestry Centre describes how transformational this straightforward practice has been.

It cites a farmer from the Maradi region in southern Niger who estimates that most farmers were getting yields of around 150kg of millet per hectare before FMNR became widespread. Many now get more than 500kg.

"The trees also increase the infiltration rate, and farmers are finding their local water table is going up," says Dennis Garrity, UN Drylands Ambassador and a senior fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre.

"This is all counter-intuitive to the paradigm of conventional agriculture, where we segregate crops and trees so they don't compete. Extension services have generally been brought up in the northern paradigm, so we still run up against that conventional paradigm that you ought to clean your fields and grow your crops like a nice crop of corn in Iowa."

That approach makes sense for northern climates with a short growing season, but in sub-Saharan Africa there's more scope for mixing tree and field crops. The local Faidherbia albida (or "gao") tree, for instance, sheds its leaves just before the planting season, enriching the soil.

"You can choose appropriate species such as these that are compatible with crops and if you manage the density and canopy appropriately you can get these dramatic benefits, which increase household income and crop production," says Garrity.

Tree management has been practised for centuries in Africa and elsewhere but the integration of existing trees into farms fell away as a result of extension practices which encouraged "clean" fields.

Since FMNR began to be encouraged in the 1980s, a previously barren area of around 5m hectares has now returned to significant levels of tree cover. These trees translate into income: the World Agroforestry Centre estimates the value of tree products among sampled households practising FMNR in Niger at about $1,000 (£650) each per year.

Crucially, the system also frees women from having to search off the farm for firewood. Instead, firewood and other tree products can be harvested on the farm itself, and also sold for additional income.

One of the drivers for scaling this up in Niger was the relaxation of strict forestry codes. Previously, farmers had no legal right to trees on their land. The enforcement of these laws gradually faltered from the 1980s, which emboldened farmers to adopt techniques such as FMNR, and by 2004 Niger's forestry law had been revised.

This is a common issue in many countries, and according to Chris Reij, a senior fellow of the World Resources Institute, it's one area where development actors can make a difference.

"Farmers are motivated when they perceive ownership of their on-farm trees," he says. "We are trying to create a grassroots movement around regreening, involving CSOs and NGOs, and are also discussing with national policymakers the need for adequate forestry legislation."

Another important issue is how to encourage adoption of the practice. In Niger, scaling up has been achieved through farmer-to-farmer learning and radio-based awareness raising. The spread can be rapid, because once a farmer adopts the practice, the impact is seen quickly, says Reij.

"Once a farmer decides to protect and manage natural regeneration, he will have to prune a tree possibly in the first year, and certainly the second year. The prunings can then be used as firewood in the kitchen. The first benefits in the field can be visible in the second year."

FMNR has also been taken up by farmers in other countries including Senegal, Burkina Faso and Mali. However, a paucity of strong data on it is still a stumbling block for development actors, according to Garrity, although DfID's recent UK climate week award for its Evergreen Agriculture project signals growing recognition of agroforestry techniques in the donor community.

"We know it's attractive to farmers, but convincing the scientific and extension community is more difficult. Development organisations want solid data to base their judgements on. We're increasingly doing research on yield, soil and water conservation benefits to fill those gaps."

As that evidence base grows, more widespread adoption of FMNR may depend on development actors continuing to help advocate for supportive forestry legislation where necessary, and also helping to develop supportive institutional environments within communities.

"As soon as farmers start to protect and manage trees, they need an affinity institution such as village organisations around it to set the rules for managing and protecting those trees, or farmers expose themselves to the risk of theft by those who don't do so," says Reij. "FMNR is low-cost and high-impact, and the actual technical part is simple. It's the institutional part that is a bit more complex."

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Record Burmese python caught in Florida

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:21:00 GMT

Snake, which measured 18.8ft and weighed 128lbs, was caught alongside rural road in Miami Dade county

Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19ft (5.8m) long has been captured in Florida.

It's a new record for the longest Burmese python caught in the wild in Florida. The previous record was a 17ft 7in python caught in August in Everglades national park.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the 18ft 8in snake was caught May 11 alongside a road in rural Miami-Dade County.

Wildlife officials said Monday that a Miami man spotted about 3ft of the snake sticking out of the roadside brush. He grabbed it and started dragging it into the open. When the snake began to wrap itself around his leg, he called to his friends for help and then used a knife to kill it.

The python weighed 128lb (58kg).

Oklahoma tornado: is climate change to blame? | Harry Enten

Harry J Enten — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:01:00 GMT

The Oklahoma twister was a 'classic look', but the data shows we are experiencing more volatility in the US tornado season

• Follow all the latest in our Oklahoma live blog

Global climate change and politics are linked to each other – for better or worse. No clearer was that the case than when Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island gave an impassioned speech on global warming in the aftermath of Monday's deadly Oklahoma tornado, and the conservative media ripped him. Whitehouse implied that at least part of the blame for the deadly tornado should be laid at the feet of climate change.

Is Whitehouse correct? It's difficult to assign any one storm's outcome to the possible effects of global climate change, and the science of tornadoes in particular makes it pretty much impossible to know whether Whitehouse is right.

Let's start with the basics of what causes a tornado. A piece from my friend (and sometimes co-chatter) Andrew Freedman two years ago sets out the basics well.

First, you need warm, humid air for moisture. The past few days in Moore have featured temperatures in the upper 70s to low 80s, with relative humidity levels regularly hitting between 90% and 100% and rarely dropping below 70%.

Second, you need strong jet stream winds to provide lift. As this map from Weather Underground indicates, there were definitely some very strong jet stream winds on Monday in the Oklahoma region.

Third, you need strong wind shear (changing wind directions and/or speeds at different heights) to allow for full instability and lift. This mid-level wind shear map from the University of Wisconsin shows that there were 45 to 50 knot winds, right at the top of the scale, over Oklahoma on Monday.

Fourth, you need something to ignite the storm. In this case, a frontal boundary, as seen in this Weather Channel map, draped across central Oklahoma, did the trick.

The point is that all the normal ingredients were there that allowed an EF-4 tornado to spawn and strike. (Examination of the storm site may cause an upgrading to EF-5.) It happened in tornado alley, where warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico often meets dry air from the north and Rocky mountains for maximum instability. There wasn't anything shocking about this from a meteorological perspective. It was, as a well-informed friend said, a "classic" look.

The long-term weather question is whether or not we'll see more or less of these "classic" looks in our changing meteorological environment. It turns out that of all the weather phenomena, from droughts to hurricanes, tornadoes are the most complex to answer from a broader atmospheric trends point of view. The reason is that a warming world affects the factors that lead to tornadoes in different ways.

Climate change is supposed, among other things, to bring warmer and moister air to earth. That, of course, would lead to more severe thunderstorms and probably more tornadoes. The issue is that global warming is also forecast to bring about less wind shear. This would allow hurricanes to form more easily, but it also would make it much harder for tornadoes to get the full about lift and instability that allow for your usual thunderstorm to grow in height and become a fully-fledged tornado. Statistics over the past 50 years bear this out, as we've seen warmer and more moist air as well as less wind shear.

Meteorological studies differ on whether or not the warmer and moister air can overcome a lack of wind shear in creating more tornadoes in the far future. In the immediate past, the jet stream, possibly because of climate change, has been quite volatile. Some years it has dug south to allow maximum tornado activity in the middle of the country, while other years it has stayed to the north.

Although tornado reporting has in prior decades been not as reliable as today because of a lack of equipment and manpower, it's still not by accident that the six least active and four most active tornado seasons have been felt over the past decade. Another statistic that points to the irregular patterns is that the three earliest and four latest starts to the tornado season have all occurred in the past 15 years.

Basically, we've had this push and pull in recent history. Some years the number of tornadoes is quite high, and some years it is quite low. We're not seeing "average" seasons as much any more, though the average of the extremes has led to no meaningful change to the average number of tornadoes per year. Expect this variation to continue into the future as less wind shear and warmer moister air fight it out.

The overall result could very well be fewer days of tornadoes per Harold Brooks of the National Storm Center, but more and stronger tornadoes when they do occur. Nothing about the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, or tornadoes over the past few decades break with this theory.

None of it proves or disproves senator Whitehouse's beliefs either. Indeed, we'll never know whether larger global warming factors were at play in Monday's storms. All we can do at this moment is react to them and give the people of Oklahoma all the help they need.

Harry J Enten

Missing oil revenue stirs discontent among Chad's poor

Charlotte Bozonnet — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:02:23 GMT

Despite billions in profits, the problem of poverty remains largely unresolved in one of the world's least developed countries

Félicité sees nothing unreasonable about her demands. Seated in one of the few shady spots in her yard, she details what she would like to obtain for her family: a decent wage, enough to eat, a health service and cheap building materials so everyone can have a home. "And school really free of charge for all children," adds this resident of Dembé, a poor neighbourhood of N'Djamena, the capital of Chad.

Félicité and her husband arrived here 20 years ago. They are fortunate in having their own home: three huts accommodating the 10 members of the family. Otherwise, life is a struggle. Even as a public-sector worker, her pay does not cover their needs, particularly with the price increases of recent years. "With the oil money all that should have sorted itself out," she complains.

Like many of their compatriots, Félicité's family cannot understand what went wrong. Ten years after the oil started to flow, Chad is still close to the bottom of the human development index, ranked 184th out of 187 by the UN in 2012. It may have started with a big handicap, but little has changed for most people, fuelling widespread discontent towards President Idriss Déby, in power for the past 22 years.

In 10 years oil has earned the country $9.8bn. "On the international market oil prices have soared. We should not feel poverty so harshly," says Delphine Djiraibe, one of the heads of the Chadian Civil Society Network for Peace and Reconciliation (CSAPR) coalition of NGOs, established in 2002, that has repeatedly criticised the poor management of this windfall. "The resentment," she adds, "is particularly strong because oil revenue mainly benefits the elite."

Hopes were high when the Doba oilfields came on stream in 2003, prompting the launch of a new development scheme. The World Bank part-funded buildinga 1,100km pipeline from Chad to Cameroon. In exchange the authorities undertook to pay 10% of the income into a fund for future generations. Of the remainder, 80% was to be allocated to priority development sectors, 5% to the Doba area and no more than 15% to the national budget. But the agreement was short-lived, the cash being primarily used to buy arms to combat various rebel movements.

Peace was restored in 2009 and the focus of spending has shifted. Chad has signed up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which requires governments to publish details of mining revenues. "The problem now is governance," says Gilbert Maoundonodji of the Gramp/TC NGO, which monitors oil exports. He reckons 80% of revenue is being spent on infrastructure, particularly roads. "Massive, disproportionate investments," he adds, "often a legal way of capturing earnings."

The authorities say that substantial amounts have been spent on development. As well as roads, many schools and hospitals have been built, with various schemes to support farming, which occupies over three-quarters of the population. "It's true," says a humanitarian worker, "but there is an acute lack of planning and supervision."

Last year saw a massive public-sector strike from July to December. "The aim was to obtain a new pay scale, which the government promised in 2011 but never implemented," says trade union leader Michel Barka. Ultimately, an agreement was reached and the minimum wage was doubled.

Despite the lingering resentment there seems little likelihood of a Chadian spring. Unlike Tunisia or Egypt, the majority of the country's youth are still rural. "And who would take the responsibility of calling for demonstrations?" asks Abderamane Gossoumian, a CSAPR official. "What's more, we can make all the demands we like, but there are no politicians to carry them forward."

The recent military intervention in Mali, broadly supported by the Chadian population, has undoubtedly strengthened Déby's hand, but it leaves a bitter taste. "The operation was so dazzling," Djiraibe explains, "it makes us forget our difficulties at home."

• This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

Charlotte Bozonnet

Cat wars break out in New Zealand

Karla Adam — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:01:24 GMT

Plan to prevent felines from killing much-prized native birds causes consternation

Call it the Kiwi cat wars. In the island nation said to harbour more cat owners per capita than any other country, a furore has broken out over a crusade to eradicate man's second-best friend. The charge is being led by Gareth Morgan, a nationally renowned economist turned environmental activist, who has dubbed cats "natural born killers" that are menacing the native bird population and bringing some to the verge of extinction.

In late January, the philanthropist launched a website outlining his plan that would eventually lead to a cat-free country. Some scientists said he was, in fact, understating the threat posed by little Fluffy, while others argued that the ecosystem was far more complex than he was allowing for.

The mere suggestion of a feline-free nation is raising the dander of cat lovers of every stripe, with everyone from the prime minister to animal-welfare activists calling Morgan a kitty hater of the worst sort.

Writing on the opposition group Cats to Stay's Facebook page, which has more than 6,000 "likes", Jeremy Chang wrote of Morgan: "making the capital pest-free? Then he should stay away from Wellington."

New Zealand has an uneasy relationship with pests. Because of its geographic isolation, the country has become home to an exotic bird life that evolved in the absence of any native mammals, save three species of bats. Many birds, including the kiwi – the country's national symbol – became flightless.

Rats, opossums, short-tailed weasels – these have long been maligned as wholly unwelcome interlopers wreaking havoc on the native birdlife and landscape. The conservation department spent two years and more than $500,000 eradicating three short-tailed weasels off nearby Kapiti Island, for example.

But cats? New Zealanders love their little felines, with one study estimating they have the highest rate of cat ownership in the world.

"We have got a concerted effort on opossums, rats, mice, mustelids, but the one that stands out is cats. Everybody is too bloody PC and scared to take on cats. So I thought, I can handle that," said Morgan, one of Wellington's best-known figures.

Undeterred by the hate mail in his inbox – much of it from Americans, Morgan says – the businessman took his message to New Zealand's third-largest island recently in a campaign to make it pest-free, meaning cleared of feral cats, rats and other pests. He also wants the 400 residents to contain their free-roaming domestic cats.

New Zealand has already cleared more than 80 of its 220 offshore islands of invasive species. But Morgan's target, Stewart Island, is 15 times larger than any other that has been made pest-free, so the effort would be closely watched by conservationists around the world.

Morgan insists he is not anti-cat, just anti-wandering-cat. He wants domestic cats registered, as dogs are, and also neutered, kept indoors at all times or taken out on a leash, and not replaced when they die.

The furore has renewed a broader debate about the possibility – however far-fetched – of a New Zealand free of pests. Why not chuck out the whole lot? The idea gained steam in early 2012 after Paul Callaghan, a celebrated scientist who died later that year, said the concept could be New Zealand's equivalent of the Apollo space programme.

The notion of a pest-free New Zealand is not without huge challenges, including a massive price tag. A recent report by Landcare Research, a government research arm, said such an undertaking would exceed $20bn.

Still, New Zealand scientists talk dreamily about their 50-year vision of a country with no pest or invasive species. Cows and sheep could stay, but opossums, rats, weasels, ferrets and mice would have to go. And cats?

"Cats are the major sticking point to a pest-free New Zealand," said James Russell, an ecologist at the University of Auckland.

Cats may be cuddly companions, but they are predators, too: a study earlier this year by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service found that cats kill a median of 2.4 billion birds in the US each year, substantially more than previously thought.

It's hard to overstate just how much New Zealanders love birds, perhaps because theirs are unlike any others on the planet. Their dollar bills are festooned with birds. Radio New Zealand plays a bird call before the morning news. There is a multimillion-dollar bird sanctuary just minutes from downtown Wellington. (Morgan calls it "the most expensive cat food factory in the country.")

But there are competing views on the impact cats have in a complex ecosystem, and whether birds would in fact be worse off in the absence of cats, who prey on bird-killing rats. "The jury is out," said Andrea Byrom, an ecologist at Landcare Research.

Morgan helps fuel the debate by taking a few playful swipes at his critics. Take, for instance, his exchange with the prime minister, John Key, after Key said his cat, Moonbeam, would never hurt a bird.

Why not perform an autopsy on Moonbeam, Morgan recalled suggesting. "And I said, 'If there isn't any feathers, I'll buy you a new one.'"

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Washington Post

Karla Adam

Pests that bug us have their own ecological importance

Brian Palmer — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:59:03 GMT

Cockroaches, mosquitoes, bedbugs - some of the insects we find repellent form a vital part of species' interdependence

I detest household bugs. Abhor them. There isn't a word strong enough to describe how I feel about bugs in my home. That hatred provokes guilt, because I fancy myself an environmentalist. As such, I'm supposed to feel a kinship with all creatures.

We're connected in a circle of life, a colourful tapestry, a delicate web of interdependence. But I can't help it: my love of animals doesn't extend to cockroaches, bedbugs and their ilk. So I'm on a mission to prove that, in the vast family of 8.7m species on Earth, there are a few that we could do without.

Consider the cockroach, that most hated human pest. If we could render it extinct, would anyone – human, animal or plant – mourn the loss?

"Roaches in general get a bad rap from the 1% of cockroach species that infest our homes," says Coby Schal, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University who studies the little critters. "Most of the 5,000 known species of cockroaches, plus probably just as many that have not been described, have huge ecological importance."

Cockroaches can be found almost anywhere that supports life. The microbes in the bellies of forest roaches break down leaf litter and other plant materials that are indigestible to many mammals. They are pollinators in the tropics. Desert lizards feed on roaches. In the south-eastern US, Schal notes, cockroaches constitute more than 50% of the diet of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, a small, black-and-white bird with a red spot behind the eye of males. If these roaches disappeared, the birds and lizards that feed on them would suffer, and some might plummet dangerously close to extinction.

Fair enough. But what about those pesky roaches that run nightly riot in urban homes?

"I don't see any great ecological value to them," Schal says. "Most of the cockroaches in homes are German cockroaches, or sometimes American cockroaches. With a few exceptions, they live almost exclusively among humans."

(A terminology note: the German cockroach isn't from Germany, nor is the American cockroach a New World native. Carolus Linnaeus, the father of the binomial naming system, was given specimens from those areas and named them accordingly. Roaches probably emerged from east Africa or south-east Asia.)

Before deciding to magically render extinct German and American cockroaches, we might pause to marvel at their adaptation to human-dominated environments. They can live in broad temperature ranges and survive for weeks without food. They can eat almost anything, from spaghetti to steak, whereas other insects specialise. They have a waxy coating that prevents them from drying out in heated or air-conditioned environments.

The dangers of cockroaches are often overstated. Cockroaches do carry bacteria: faecal matter adheres to them, they ingest it during grooming and they defecate it, sometimes on to human food sources or food-related equipment. Nevertheless, Schal says, few studies have conclusively shown that roaches regularly transmit disease to humans. In fact, their main danger to people is the production of airborne allergenic proteins that are inhaled by people. Urban children sometimes suffer asthma or allergy attacks from roach exposure.

The verdict on cockroaches? It's unanimous among the entomologists I spoke with, at least for German cockroaches: we could safely eliminate them. They are so exquisitely adapted to life with humans that they fill no other ecological niche.

So what about bedbugs? If you've never faced a bedbug infestation, count yourself lucky. Their bites can cause enormous welts, and getting rid of the little critters is an ordeal, especially since some of the chemical agents most effective in combating them have been banned as environmental toxins. Is there anything nice to say about bedbugs?

"Some species of ants feed on bedbugs, as do a few spiders," says Michael Potter, an urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky. "We often find them caught in spider webs in dwellings. But is that the spider's primary source of food? Would the whole system come crashing down without them? I doubt it."

The frustrating thing is that we have already beaten back bedbugs once, at least in the US. When international travel increased in the 1990s, Potter notes, these insects returned to the US from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and parts of eastern Europe. We're partially culpable for their return. People used to prophylactically treat their mattresses and checked hotel beds when they travelled, but those habits faded. We also stopped developing new treatments to poison them, and bedbugs have become resistant to established methods.

Like the German cockroach, the common bedbug lives almost entirely among humans, and the entomologists I surveyed all agreed with Potter that, if they could, they would wave a magic wand and eliminate bedbugs. ("I'd wave it twice, just to be sure," says Micky Eubanks, an insect ecologist at Texas A&M University.)

When asked the more general question about which pests could safely be destroyed, Eubanks developed a theory: species living in their natural ranges at normal concentrations must be tolerated. Those living outside their ranges at excess abundance can at least be reduced if not discarded. (The German cockroach, for example, has no native range aside from our homes.) In between, there is a balancing act to be done.

He points to the Colorado potato beetle as an example. This insect is native to the New World and used to feed on a wild relative of the cultivated potato. When potato agriculture entered into the bug's natural range, the population exploded. It would be nice to reduce them, but take away too many and other creatures, such as parasitoid wasps that feast on them, would clearly suffer. You may not like wasps, but the loss of them would affect other predators, and a chain reaction would begin.

Mosquitoes are another tricky case. No creature is more dangerous to humans. Mosquito-borne illnesses kill more than a million people annually. But they are an important part of the ecosystem.

"Mosquitoes represent a significant biomass of food for other species," Potter says. "In places like Alaska, you get a huge emergence of adult mosquitoes when the temperature rises, and they are an important source of food for migratory birds and other critters."

Destroying mosquitoes might be risky, but I'm feeling much better about my willingness to get rid of German cockroaches and common bedbugs. It seems that some branches of the tree of life can be trimmed back a bit.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

Brian Palmer

Letter from the Netherlands: bright bulbs

Catherine Ann Lombard — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:59:01 GMT

The colours and scents of the Dutch tulips transform both tourists and cynical locals alike

With standing room only, the bus sped down the freeway on a bright warm morning. Once we turned on to the Bollenstreek, long ribbons of intense blue, mauve and white stretched to the near horizon. Fields of yellow daffodils blared spring's final triumph over the particularly long winter. Every head on the bus turned and gazed. And then suddenly, quite spontaneously, everyone sighed together, "Aaahhhhhhhh." A breath song of collective awe.

We were headed to Keukenhof Gardens, famous for its variety of bulb flowers, especially tulips. I was feeling triumphant because I had two Dutch people in tow. My husband had finally run out of excuses and decided to appease his American wife. Along with us was a friend who, despite having lived near the gardens for the past 35 years, had never visited them.

It seemed that every time I mentioned this beautifully landscaped garden to the Dutch, they would smile uncomfortably as if to say, "Oh, that place full of tourist buses where you have to pay to see tulips. No thanks." No matter how hard I tried to convince them of the wonder and unique beauty of viewing seven million bulbs in bloom, the Dutch just looked at me like someone to be pitied.

Even our friend had justified her visit to the park to her children by saying there was "an American lady who wanted to go". But not 10 minutes after our arrival, she and my husband were overcome with the fragrance of hyacinths, the morning light flickering through cherry blossoms, the sound of water flowing over carefully placed stones, and the old oaks whose gnarled trunks resembled elephant feet.

People of all nations and faiths were visibly touched by the richness around them. Languages softly floated and whirled around us blending with the scent of blossoms. Cameras clicked. A French couple snapped photos of their two toddlers sitting in a tulip field. Young women dressed in hijabs stood for their photos next to potted black tulips aptly named Queen of the Night. Japanese women, afraid of tanning, hid under umbrellas held by gloved hands. A fleet of elderly in wheelchairs posed by the fountain, its sound rushing, swishing, gurgling beyond us.

"If only the world could just plant tulips," I thought. Even as thousands of visitors poured in throughout the day, a stillness remained. The natural beauty of scent, colour, sound and sunlight seemed to quiet the restless minds and chatter of people. In some ways, it felt like paradise, as we all mingled past flowers that we knew, like ourselves, were fleeting in time, transitory in nature.

• Every week Guardian Weekly publishes a Letter from one of its readers from around the world. We welcome submissions – they should focus on giving a clear sense of a place and its people. Please send them to weekly.letter.from@guardian.co.uk

Catherine Ann Lombard

Twitter hit-and-run boast shows dangers of 'road tax' entitlement | Dawn Foster

Dawn Foster — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:25:28 GMT

When drivers say cyclists don't belong on the roads because they 'don't pay tax', it is a dangerous, dehumanising attitude

It's safe to assume that most people in the event of hitting a cyclist while driving, who realised what they had done, would stop, call the police, and stay on the scene. Not so for one young woman, who appears to have hit a cyclist, carried on driving, and then most bizarrely taken to Twitter to boast of the incident.

@emmaway20 Emma Way
Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier – I have right of way he doesn't even pay road tax! #bloodycyclists

Norwich Police responded quickly, asking Emma to get in touch with them as soon as possible, and report it, rather than broadcast it to the world.

@emmaway20 we have had tweets ref an RTC with a bike. We suggest you report it at a police station ASAP if not done already & then dm us
— Norwich Police (@NorwichPoliceUK) May 19, 2013

Way has since deleted her Twitter account, after cyclists on Twitter roundly turned on her, especially once a cyclist came forward who had been hit by a car that didn't stop shortly before Way's missive. Toby Hockley, who'd been riding the Boudicca Sportive with the Iceni Velo club, came forward after seeing the fallout on Twitter. Both parties are now in contact with the police, Norfolk constabulary have confirmed.

What her statement says about hierarchy on our roads is just as interesting as watching social media close the net around someone claiming to have injured a cyclist. For starters there's the tiresome fact that, as every cyclist knows, road tax doesn't exist – you pay vehicle excise duty for your car, and road maintenance is funded from centralised taxes. Yet, the canard of "road tax" as an annual toll for using roads is rolled out time and again by motorists annoyed at the mere presence of bikes on the road. The fact that cyclists seemingly "don't pay" to use roads, then overtake motorists in traffic jams rankles, is burned deep in the minds of our more irrational drivers.

This internalised hierarchy on the roads is also evident as a pedestrian – it's not uncommon to be crossing a road when the lights have turned amber and have cars race off narrowly avoiding you, or for cars to ignore the fact you've stepped onto a zebra crossing for the sake of shaving a few seconds off their journey. But cyclists seem to bear the brunt of this – few cyclists don't experience regular outbursts of road rage, or dangerous driving from motorists who've clearly clocked them but are simply unhappy they're allowed on the road at all.

I've been told to "pay road tax" more times than I can remember, though sadly explaining the intricacies of road taxation – deftly explained by the excellent site I Pay Road Tax – takes longer than the few seconds you get on the road. And when this entitlement dehumanises cyclists to the extent someone is happy to excuse hitting a cyclist by explaining they don't believe they should be on the road at all, it becomes more than an annoyance – it's an active danger.

Dawn Foster

Climate change pushes farmers in India to the tipping point – in pictures

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:42:32 GMT

Gerry Judah, born in Kolkata, returned to India after more than 50 years to see how people are tackling the effects of global warming

Chelsea flower show at 100: A century of (newspaper) cuttings

Jason Rodrigues — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:35:00 GMT

Even with 100 years of media attention, not everything written about the Chelsea flower show has been so blooming obvious

Now in its hundredth year, the Chelsea Flower Show clings on, almost ivy-like, to its past. Just as it is wedded to convention, so too is the language used by the press to describe the annual 'horticultural extravaganza'. Like the rest of Fleet Street, the Guardian and Observer have fallen into this trap - just carry out a simple archive search and you will unearth trusty descriptions of the event being a 'blaze' or 'riot' of colour, or an 'oasis of beauty'. The winner of the gold medal has to be the Observer for its 1935 headline describing the show as a Pageant of Loveliness.

This year's event, with its glistening rock pools and velvet smooth lawns, will feature garden gnomes, which had been banned by organisers for being crude and inelegant. Ask any of the 165,000 visitors that are expected to attend this year, and they will tell you about the Royal Horticultural Society's very high standards and rules that exhibitors must abide by.

In the 1950s one excited designer is said to have created a formal garden around a swimming pool, adding a pair of dazzling blonde models in swimsuits as a finishing touch. Mortified by what they had seen, the organisers initially struggled to find a suitable reason to ban the work. Eventual they invoked the rule which forbids 'livestock' of any kind.

A fondness for rules may have gained the Royal Horticultural Society a grouchy reputation but their Great Spring Show, to give it its original name, did change with the times. When the show returned after the First World War, much emphasis was given to the utilitarian use of land to grow cheap food, seen as more important in post-war Britain than decorative gardening and the fashion for 'lordy orchid houses kept up by wealthy men.'

By the 1930s, the reputation of the flower show had grown to the point that practically every parson and his wife from the country queued with city folk to squeeze into the annual show. Despite the discomfort, many were educated on how to cultivate roses and rhododendrons, or were dazzled by the spectacle of an exotic Japanese garden. The nation's obsession with all things horticultural extended to the Royal Family, who were spared the crush by being shown round before the public.

In the 1950s the flower show seemed to turn its back on massed ranks of azaleas and begonias, as green-leaved indoor plants offered a visual relief from the 'blaze of colour' traditionally associated with Chelsea. The Guardian's visit in 1957 also noted that the 'implement section' - garden tools, as we now call them - had long queues, with visitors clutching cheque books so they could purchase the latest gardening hardware.

It was this drift towards commercialisation that riled the famed naturalist David Bellamy, who reportedly refused to attend the event in 1999.

If Bellamy's barbed comments about the show weren't damaging enough, a scathing attack on the event by Monty Don, writing in the Observer in 2001, must have made the organisers feel like someone was aiming a sharp pitch fork at them. Maybe Don was only saying what many had always thought about the Chelsea Flower Show - that it was 'driven by money and snobbery' - but his comments could not have made comfortable reading for the organisers.

Jason Rodrigues

Schmallenberg vaccine available to UK farmers this summer

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:36:02 GMT

Vaccine will prevent a disease that causes severe birth defects and miscarriages in livestock

A new vaccine is being made available to prevent a disease which causes severe birth defects and miscarriages in livestock, it was announced today.

Schmallenberg virus, which emerged in the Netherlands and Germany in 2011 and has been seen in cattle and sheep in the UK since early 2012, has been identified on more than 1,700 farms across the country.

Adult animals infected during pregnancies in the autumn by virus-carrying midges, thought to have blown across the Channel, have given birth to deformed or stillborn lambs and calves.

UK farmers are the first in the European Union to have access to a vaccine against Schmallenberg, which will be available for vaccinating livestock this summer before most animals become pregnant again.

The Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) has licensed veterinary pharmaceutical company MSD Animal Health to provide the "Bovolis SBV" vaccine.

VMD chief executive, Pete Borriello, said: "This is the culmination of intensive activity on the part of MSD Animal Health and the VMD to make a safe and effective vaccine available to tackle Schmallenberg.

"Without in any way compromising the scientific rigour of our assessment process, we accelerated our assessment so that a vaccine will be available this summer."

This means it will be possible to vaccinate sheep and cattle before most of them become pregnant. This is important as it is during pregnancy when exposure to the virus can cause damage to the foetus."

The government's deputy chief veterinary officer, Alick Simmons, said: "The vaccine will give extra assurance against this disease on top of the natural immunity we expect sheep and cattle to develop after initial exposure."

Biofuels a boon for Brazil's rural poor, but obstacles remain elsewhere | Paige McClanahan

Paige McClanahan — Tue, 21 May 2013 06:00:05 GMT

While biofuels have facilitated slow but positive change for farmers in Brazil, other countries have been less successful

Biofuels have long been hailed as one of the potential answers to climate change. Their environmental credentials are controversial, but a handful of countries are now looking at them from another angle entirely: they want to use biofuels to try to reduce poverty among rural smallholder farmers.

Such efforts are in full force in Brazil, a country that is home to both a sizeable biofuels industry and about 4.1m small-scale family farms. But while some of the country's biofuels policies have fallen short, others have proved a boon to the rural poor. Smallholder farmers have seen their incomes rise thanks to the introduction of more progressive standards and new rules on contract negotiations.

"The numbers show that the farmers in Brazil … have been earning far more than they were before – not only in absolute quantities, but also as a percentage of the whole value of the [biofuels production] chain," says Mairon Bastos Lima, a PhD researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the author of a recent briefing paper (pdf) that looked at the social impacts of biofuels polices in Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Bastos Lima describes the Brazilian biofuels policies as "the best example" he has seen.

In most cases, he says, smallholder farmers who cultivate biofuels are included only in the lowest level of the production chain. That means that most of the wealth from production accrues to the refiners, or to the company that is managing the process, not to the farmers themselves. But in Brazil this has started to change, albeit slowly.

This success, Bastos Lima says, is largely due to the fact that Petrobras, Brazil's state-run energy giant, created its own biofuels division in 2008. The new state company took over from the private firms that had been running the government's biofuels production contracts with smallholder farmers in north-eastern Brazil.

When Petrobras came on the scene, the company introduced a number of changes. It required that farmers devote no more than 20% of their arable land to growing the precursors to biofuels; the rest of their farms had to be reserved for edible crops. This "mixed food and feed-stock" policy helps to guarantee that the farmers maintain a steady food supply, regardless of what happens in the biofuels market.

Petrobras also introduced a policy of including social movements in all of its contract negotiations with smallholder farmers. Under the current policy, any contractual agreement with farmers is not valid until a rural social movement has signed off on it.

"This balances the bargaining power," says Bastos Lima, "because suddenly you cannot put pressure on one individual household" to accept the terms of an agreement. The impact of the change is already being felt.

"Social movements had to fight really hard with Petrobras to actually stand their ground and say, 'no, we want to climb up at least one step in the value chain … and have more of an income'," says Bastos Lima.

The number of households involved in Brazil's smallholder biofuels production programme quadrupled between 2008 and 2010; more than 100,000 families are now involved. In 2010, the Brazilian government bought roughly $635m (£413m) worth of biofuels feedstock from its smallholder farmers, a fivefold increase from two years earlier.

But while Brazil has had some success with its efforts to include smallholder farmers in the biofuels production chain, things have not always gone so well in other places, warns Bastos Lima.

"The case of India has been particularly disastrous," he says, noting that the Indian government placed a huge bet on a plant called jatropha, which was widely hailed as the next big breakthrough in biofuels back in 2007 and 2008. Inspired by promising scientific studies, the government called for the cultivation of jatropha on more than 11m hectares (27m acres) of land. But then reality set in: the crop's yields were disappointing, and many Indian farmers were left with reduced incomes, coupled with a smaller supply of food to give their own families.

Such experiences demonstrate why more work needs to be done to understand the social consequences of biofuels production, says Chris Charles, a project manager in the Geneva office of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

"There's a real lack of research – quantitative and qualitative research – assessing … the extent of the negative or positive impacts on smallholder farmers," says Charles. "Campaigning groups publish very emotional pieces showing small farmers in Asia, for example, being displaced from their land by large monoculture biofuel operations. [But] it's hard to know how academic or rigorous that analysis is."

• This article was corrected on 21 May 2013. The Institute for Environmental Studies is at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, not the University of Amsterdam

Paige McClanahan

Marine Harvest agrees to limit pesticides and seal killings

Severin Carrell — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:30:00 GMT

The company, which grows 25% of Scottish farmed salmon, will join Aquaculture Stewardship council's strict new scheme

One of the world's largest fish farm companies, Marine Harvest, has voluntarily agreed to much tougher limits on its pesticides use and seal killing by joining a strict new environment scheme.

Marine Harvest will join the Aquaculture Stewardship council, a new accreditation scheme championed by WWF, after coming under repeated attack for heavy use of toxic chemicals, seal-killing and major outbreaks of sea lice and salmon diseases.

The Norwegian-owned company, which grows 25% of all Scotland's farmed salmon, has promised to put all its UK fish farms through ASC accreditation by the end of this decade in what supporters of the scheme believes could transform the environmental sustainability of salmon farming.

It will force the firm to put a strict cap on escapes of farmed salmon – a problem with critics believe threatens the survival of wild salmon stocks – and cut chemical treatments. Under the scheme, the killing of seals as a precautionary measure to protect salmon will be drastically reduced but not entirely stopped. It would also require the company to only use fishfeed derived from Marine Stewardship Council-accredited wild fish stocks or other, non-wild sources of protein.

The move follows increasing criticism by environment and conservation campaigners about the Freedom Foods scheme operated by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which only applies the minimum legal standards on environmental protection and has been widely criticised for failing to penalise fish farms that breach standards.

Under the ASC scheme, said Lang Banks, director WWF Scotland, the company's farms would lose it accreditation if it fails to meet standards.

Guy Linley-Adams, of the Salmon & Trout Association, which has been highly critical of the fish farming industry, said: "This isn't the end of the story. Marine Harvest still have fish-farms in the wrong places, as do all fish-farmers. They are too near to wild salmonid rivers threatening wild fish conservation and those farms need to be relocated."

Severin Carrell

Country diary: Coombs Dale, Derbyshire

Ed Douglas — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Coombs Dale, Derbyshire: The land is scarred and nicked, like the face of a veteran fighter, but the blackthorn is smothered in blossom

The high limestone country north of Longstone Edge has its own strange energy, a consequence perhaps of the quarrying there, both ancient and modern. The land is scarred and nicked, like the face of a veteran fighter, a blue-collar countryside.

It's also rich with tales of horror, now recruited for the purposes of tourism. The notorious highwayman Black Harry, hanged at nearby Wardlow Mires, has lent his name to a network of bridleways for horse riders to explore.

Running across this landscape is the drawn bow of Coombs Dale, with its own legacy of mine workings but now a refuge for nature in the green mosaic of white-walled pasture with, in Ted Hughes' phrase, its "reluctant nibbled grass".

One moment I'm on the main road through Stoney Middleton Dale, rattling with quarry traffic, the next in an almost secret world, at the bottom of a steep-sided valley, and bathed in spring sunshine.

Coombs Dale is known for its rarities: dark green fritillaries that congregate near Sallet Hole Mine, the woolly-headed thistle, maiden pink and leadwort. The southern slopes are covered in cowslips.

Alongside the path are hazel and willows thick with catkins. But the real pleasure is the blossom smothering the blackthorn. Last month I cycled up this lane under grey skies and barely noticed them. Now I'm shrouded in their scent.

It's not just the raw appeal of the dale threaded with creamy white flowers. Blackthorn has an almost sculptural appeal, the thick thorns spreading horizontally, which adds a spiky depth to the overall effect.

Most wood is useful, but blackthorn has an intimate, tactile quality to its utility: wands, walking sticks, shillelaghs and, in the hands of Black Rod, parliamentary doorknockers.

By the time I emerge into the upper dale, the sky has darkened and a brief hailstorm stings my face while the lambs curl up for warmth.

Ed Douglas

Worst natural disasters of 2012 by numbers displaced – in pictures

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:49:00 GMT

Flooding, often during monsoons and sometimes accompanied by typhoons, displaced the most people last year

Heartland Institute wastes real scientists' time – yet again | John Abraham

John Abraham — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:33:00 GMT

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where armchair experts gave up fighting over whether climate change is occurring?

This spring, I began receiving calls and emails from colleagues about a strange little book that was mailed to environmental science professors around the country. This was a big mailing, in total, a reported 100,000 copies were sent out. What was it about this little book that got us talking? Many things. First, a coordinated mailing of a book is unusual. But what is more unusual is a book that purports to be the "real story" about climate change, with graphs, figures, and tables. It came with a foreward by Senator Harrison Schmitt who is well known for misrepresenting the science. There was also an accompanying letter by Fred Singer. Many of us already know of Fred Singer; he was focused on in an excellent book by Dr Naomi Oreskes who catalogued his history of undermining the science and concerns related to second-hand smoke, ozone depletion, and acid rain. The letter from Fred Singer was on letterhead from the Heartland Institute which is a radical organisation that had compared belief in global warming to murder.

While author of the book, Mr Goreham, is described as a "researcher on environmental issues", a literature search for scientific publications revealed nothing.

But all this, by itself, doesn't mean much. I mean we are all entitled to our opinions on any subject, even if we don't know much about it, aren't we? Sure… but your opinions should be based in fact. With this in mind, let's examine some of the claims made in the book.

The best way to evaluate a claim is to go to its source. It appears that the author had ample references to support his claims. The only problem… the reference list isn't included in the book, nor is an index. Now why would an author reference papers but not list them in the book? I had to dig around to find the missing references so I could fact-check the text.

In his discussion of past climate variations, Mr Goreham used graphics from a contrarian website (CO2Science); I have previously debunked this site. He had other sources as well. In the book, Goreman references a graph which he claims he obtained from the 1995 IPCC report on climate change. The problem is the figure isn't there. He must have lifted the figure from a different report. Perhaps that was just a typo, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. On the same page, however, he cites a graph as originating from a 1998 paper by Mike Mann. That, too, is incorrect, the figure wasn't in the Mann paper. I wrote to Steve, asking him to clarify where these images had originated. He responded that I was right, he had made mistakes. He promised to correct these errors in future editions of his book.

I then reviewed the other papers he cited, did they really show a medieval period that was global and warmer than today? One of the authors that Mr. Goreham cited regarding the presence of a medieval warm period (MWP) was Dr Delia Oppo. I wrote to Oppo who works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She responded:

I do not think that data from one location should be used to assess whether globally, the MWP was warmer or colder than today. As you say, there is considerable evidence to the contrary (mostly from tree rings). Further, as you also noted, even if it WAS as warm during the MWP as it is today it does not follow logically that the recent warming is natural.

Goreham went on to make statements linking changes in the Pacific Ocean to temperature trends however comparing his own graphs on pages 67 and 68 shows that they do not match very well. Surely he should have caught this inconvenient inconsistency during the editing process?

What about his claim that scientists ignore the sun? That too is pure fantasy.

His statements that temperatures have been flat or declining in the past few years? Also not true. But if Mr Goreham won't take my word for it, maybe he will take the word of the Koch-brothers funded study which agrees with me.

What about his claim that humans are responsible for only a very small fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Wrong again. Humans are responsible for approximately 40% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today. In fact, Goreham makes an elementary-school error by confusing gross emissions with net emissions. This is a mistake that anyone with a bank account can see. It is like the difference between the paycheck deposited in your bank account and the amount of money that remains after paying all of your bills. He also gets confused about how long elevated carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere. The high levels of carbon dioxide which results from human emissions will persist for decades and centuries, far longer than the 5-6 year molecule-specific residence time he claims.

What about his comments that the ocean will just absorb the carbon we emit? Wrong again. But then again, Goreham never claimed to be good a chemistry.

What about his claims that "all major climate models assume positive feedback"? Wrong again.

But it gets even worse. On one page (83), Gorehman admits that water vapor is an important greenhouse gas. But then just a few pages later (88) he states that the effect of water vapor may act to reduce warming. Not only does Goreham disagree with real scientists, he disagrees with himself. Now, in his defence, Goreham may be confusing water vapor with clouds. But real scientists know they are not the same thing. In fact, Goreham cites two studies by Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer that don't even deal with water vapor feedback. I'm going to go out on a limb here but I challenge Mr Goreham to get the very scientists he cites (Lindzen or Spencer) to agree with him that increased water vapor may not cause warming.

Just a few more errors, stick with me. On page 91 Goreham claims the IPCC "discounts" the sun. This is absurd and the quote he supplies is obviously misunderstood. What about his claims that the Antarctic is "growing". Real science disagrees here and here. His statement that the Greenland Ice Sheet is "healthy"? Not according to these real scientists or these.

At this point, I just had to skip to the end of the book and hope it was the end of the errors. Not so. At the close of the book (page 238), Goreham discusses ocean temperature measurements down to depths of 2,000 meters to determine how much heat is entering ocean waters. But then, he shows a "surprising result" that there has been no change in ocean heat content. What is "surprising" is that the data he shows isn't for ocean depths of 2,000 meters at all. In fact, he only shows data for a small fraction of the ocean waters. Had he shown the correct data, he would have come to the correct conclusion – oceans are warming.

So let's put all these errors, misinterpretations, and misguided comments aside. We know Mr Goreham isn't a climate scientist, in fact, isn't a publishing scientist at all. He admitted that in an email to me. What we should reflect upon is the absurdity of this mailing. Who really thinks that this glossy-covered book will sway real climate experts? Not a chance. It is much more likely that this was a major waste of time and effort. Why would such effort be spent? Why would the author now be promoted as a speaker who charges up to $5,000 per event as someone who can "deliver the real story" when he fails miserably in print?

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where armchair experts gave up fighting over whether climate change is occurring and instead spend their time working on solutions? Solutions that we could implement today that would not only clean up the environment but would also create jobs, improve international security, and diversify energy supplies? Until we move on to that discussion, we scientists have the thankless job of fact-checking persons like Mr Goreham. It's a boring job but someone has to do it.

Dr. John Abraham
University of St. Thomas
Climate Science Rapid Response Team
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund

John Abraham

Climate disasters displace millions of people worldwide

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:50:00 GMT

More than 32 million people fled their homes last year because of disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes

Green heating payments to double for householders

Adam Vaughan — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:44:52 GMT

Rates for one-off payments will be increased to support the market as renewable heat incentive delays continue

Payments to help householders switch from heating their homes with oil to greener systems such as biomass boilers and solar thermal will double in most cases, the government is to announce on Monday.

The grants were intended as a stopgap measure until the start this summer of the government's bigger renewable heat incentive (RHI) scheme – ongoing payments akin to the feed-in tariff for solar panels but for generating low-carbon heat. But in March, the RHI was postponed until 2014, in a delay that industry said it was "bitterly disappointed" with.

From today, rates for the one-off payments, the Renewable Heat Premium Payment (RHPP) scheme, will be increased to support the market through the limbo imposed by the delay.

Energy and climate change minister Greg Barker said: "I want to kickstart this exciting new market for consumer renewable heat technologies. This time limited, big increase in the value of vouchers for hardworking people who want to do something positive to install money saving green heating in their homes, should be a real boost for this growing green sector."

Payments for ground source heat pumps, which extract warmth from underground, nearly double from £1,250 to £2,300, and air source heat pumps – which take heat from air outside a home – rise from £850 to £1,300. Biomass boilers that provide a theoretically carbon-neutral supply of hot water and heating go from £950 to £2,000, and solar panels that heat water double to £600. The total value of the fund for the payments is £12m.

More than 10,000 people have used the vouchers since they were first introduced in 2011.

Gaynor Hartnell, chief executive of trade body the Renewable Energy Association, said: "It's welcome that these grants are being continued and the levels increased. They need to stay in place until the proper heat payment scheme for householders commences. This has been delayed on a number of occasions and we hope this will be the last time this stop-gap measure is needed."

However, under new rules announced today, householders wanting to take advantage of the payments will first have to pay around £100-150 for an assessment under the government's new flagship energy efficiency scheme. The green deal, launched in January, allows householders to take out a loan with companies who undertake work such as upgrading old boilers and lagging lofts.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said that the increased payments were partly to offset the cost of the green deal assessments, which it said would "help householders think about how renewable heat could fit with energy efficiency improvements for their home".

Renewable heating technologies largely only make financial sense for homes that are off the gas grid. Most householders using a gas-fired boiler would be unlikely to recoup the initial outlay of a solar thermal system for more than 30 years, under the proposals for the domestic RHI.

Adam Vaughan

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