Eat as much of this meat as you like

Here is a meat industry I think we can all give more support to. In comparison to factory farmed meat (i.e. most of what is generally available in supermarkets), this meal has a much smaller footprint.
H/T Sair.

Mainly bad news

A few things our new government largely ignores*

Total disaster: "Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. [...] The loss of biodiversity compounds poverty. Destroy your nature and you increase poverty and insecurity."

Big coal gets bigger: a bet that there will be no serious cost placed on carbon emissions.

Mangrove losses worse than thought. Less than 7% of remaining mangroves are protected.

Antarctica ought to be World Heritage listed.

Conservative conservation in the UK: a false dawn?

Mackerel wars: and Mackerel are often considered something a "success story" in the prevention of overfishing.

Scientists claim almost 80% of Gulf spill is still in the water, contradicting the government claim that most has been skimmed, burned, collected, evaporated or digested by microbes. See also here.

Corals dying: coral reefs are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Rising ocean temperatures, falling oxygen levels, rising acidity, falling fisheries, rising plastics - the bad news is pretty bad for corals.

Consumerism means "Earth Overshoot Day" arrives earlier every year. This year, the date on which we use all the resources that can be replenished in a year will be 27th September.

Desertification: "An area the size of Greece, or of Nepal, is lost every year to desertification and soil erosion, the world body said, equivalent to $42-billion in annual income."

The wake-up call: when my alarm goes, I usually hit snooze and roll over.

Now here's one biofuel I can get behind: made from whisky byproducts, it reduces the ecological footprint of water of life by reusing waste materials.

A small piece of "good" news: plummeting levels of phytoplankton might inhibit hurricane formation.

Priceless collection of crop biodiversity "saved" by Twitter. I'm not entirely sure whether this is good news (Russians are considering a halt to gross stupidity) or bad news (it took Twitter to achieve this).
*This post was scheduled a few days ago and this claim is more or less true on either outcome.

An introduction to climate change: graphs and data

Climate change: it's not rocket science; it's considerably more complex.

The sheer mass of data collected across the globe that contributes to a picture of a world being warmed predominantly by human activity is stunning. This is not just surface atmospheric temperatures (which receives the most attention), but atmospheric temperatures at a range of greater heights, ocean temperatures (again, not just on the surface, but at various levels), precipitation patterns, humidity levels, sea ice extent, area and volume, land ice volume and area, glacier flow rates, extent of permafrost, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and various other greenhouse gases, methane levels in the ocean, acidity of the ocean, migration patterns of birds and insects, flowering dates of hundreds of plant species, emergence dates of hundreds of species of insects, length of growing seasons, geographic distribution and prevalence of thousands of species, river flow rates and peak flow dates, satellite measurements of temperatures and radiation levels - and much, much more! And all this is before we even start talking about the various proxies that give us insight into climate conditions prior to widespread measurements.

With all this supporting data, it's no surprise that 97% of active climatologists think the theory of anthropogenic climate change is the best explanation and that almost every scientific body of national or international standing has been willing to risk their precious reputation by agreeing.

Here is a video that gives you a taste of just some of this enormous store of data and the clear pattern that can be seen throughout. Of course there is regional and annual variation, but the overall picture is apparent to even the untrained eye. If you prefer text, this gives a good brief overview.

See here for the start of a series that gives more of my take on climate change.