Decades of exploration and exploitation has led to severe contamination in the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve in Peru’s AmazonWalk into one of the many tour agencies in Iquitos, the biggest city in Peru’s Amazon, and you’ll hear many wonderful things about the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve. “Best place to see animals in their natural habitat,” one guide says. “An abundance of parrots, paiche and monkeys, and all kinds of bird species,” cries another.“Pacaya-Samiria”, as it’s dubbed, extends for just over two million hectares and is the second largest of Peru’s 170 “protected natural areas.” In 2015 USA Today’s travel website 10Best voted it the world’s second “Best Place for Wildlife”, losing out to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. “Located near the Amazon headwaters in Peru,” 10Best stated, “the reserve is home to some of the biggest wildlife populations in the Amazon.”

Climate change has been markedly absent from 2016 US presidential debates

Our national park authorities are vandals and fabulists, inflicting mass destruction on wildlife and habitats, then calling it conservationAt one end of the country, conservation groups are doing all they can to stop the burning of moors. Challenging the grouse shooting estates, for example, the RSPB argues that “there is an urgent need to restore these landscapes by … bringing an end to burning.”At the other end of the country, conservation groups are doing all they can to ensure that moors are burnt. Continue reading...

It’s getting more difficult to find and retain good people for prominent public posts, as the Environment Agency chair’s departure demonstrates

Little Gransden, Cambridgeshire The iron wheels spoke of long-ago summers and children cadging rides on a hay cartHidden from sight of the neat farmhouse with its whitewashed walls, sash windows and trim thatched roof, the farmer’s thought processes and plans seemed laid bare. Screened by a brick barn there was an open-air repository of the “has been, could be, will be, and can’t-bear-to-part-withs”.What the rest of us might store in private was open to view here from the public footpath that ran alongside, with only a waist-high fence separating me from an eclectic assortment of stuff. Continue reading...

Boss of carmaker that cheated on tests of toxic NOx emissions downplays impact of scandal and says diesel vehicles needed to reduce CO2 levelsTaking too many diesel cars off the road because they have been blamed for Europe’s air pollution problems would risk the industry missing its climate change targets, the boss of Volkswagen UK has warned.Related: London takes just one week to breach annual air pollution limits Continue reading...

Lost coursework, homeless students and portacabin classrooms – schools in the Calder Valley and Cumbria get to grips with the devastation caused by floodingIt was anything with a child’s name on it that headteacher Clare Cope found hardest to deal with: exercise books, little PE bags, violin cases – all covered in a thick, black, smelly sludge.“We walked around and we couldn’t believe it,” says Cope, who works at Burnley Road Academy in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire. “I thought a couple of inches of water might have got in, but it was so much worse than that – just total devastation.” Continue reading...

Law firm ClientEarth says it will seek urgent court action because of the risk to people’s lives from dangerous emissionsUK environment ministers will be taken to court within weeks to make them speed up plans to reduce dangerous urban air pollution.

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire In the season of snipe, six stand together, winged probes the colour of the winter marshesThe snipe are not skulking, they’re invisible. Six stand together in the rushes beside Venus Pool, six winged probes the colour of winter marshes, so extraordinarily beautiful they cannot be seen except for their eye glints.When Henry David Thoreau looked back on his time of solitude at Walden Pond he confessed: “For many years I was the self-appointed inspector of … rainstorms and I did my duty faithfully.” Snipe are inspectors of rainstorms, rain and the journeys of rain through the land. This is the season of snipe, the glorious utopia of resurgent flood meadow they have dreamed of. Continue reading...

An unpleasant house guest has been discovered at an Adelaide home – a highly venomous eastern brown snake. After seeing the snake’s head appear from under her refrigerator, a justifiably shaken Moana resident contacted Snake Catchers Adelaide. An extra surprise came later – the snake went on to lay more than a dozen eggs. Continue reading...

Highly venomous eastern brown snake discovered peering out from under refrigerator in suburban Adelaide is captured, then goes on to lay 15 eggsAn Adelaide woman got the fright of her life when she went to get a drink from the fridge and discovered a brown snake peering out from underneath.The venomous eastern brown snake had a surprise in store for the homeowners – it was heavily pregnant and later laid 15 eggs. Continue reading...

Do you yearn for the soft, instant light of the incandescent bulb? Edison’s invention could be back – in an even more efficient form than energy-saving fluorescentsAs a metaphor, the “lightbulb moment” doesn’t work so well now that we have to wait five minutes for a low-energy bulb to get going. But a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have had a bit of a lightbulb moment. The fondly remembered, but extremely inefficient, old-fashioned tungsten bulb could soon be modified to reuse its wasted energy. This would make it even more efficient than the new types of energy-saving LED and compact fluorescent bulbs to which we’ve switched in recent years.Almost all the energy used by old filament bulbs is converted to heat, with only around 5% given off as light. In their paper, poetically entitled “resurrection of the incandescent source”, the MIT team describe how infrared radiation, which would otherwise be wasted, can be reflected and reabsorbed through a structure of up to 300 layers around the filament, using nanotechnology. “It is not so much the material you make the surrounding structure from, it is how you arrange the material to create the optical filtering property that will recycle infrared light and let the visible light through,” said Ognjen Ilic, from MIT’s research laboratory of electronics. This research could lead, one day, to the introduction of a high-tech lightbulb with an old-world glow. Continue reading...

Police confirm handful of arrests after demonstrators lock themselves in tunnels to frustrate attempt to take over site in UptonAn eviction battle has begun at the UK’s longest running anti-fracking camp, which protesters have fortified with tunnels, tree houses and a moat.Dozens of police officers and bailiffs arrived at the camp on Duttons Lane, Upton, Cheshire, on Tuesday morning, more than two months after the high court ordered protesters to leave the site so that drilling could begin. Continue reading...

Insurance company, which sent out almost 200 claims advisers and adjustors, says about 90% of first damage assessment visits have been completedDirect Line, one of Britain’s biggest insurers, will take a hit of up to £140m from the three storms that flooded parts of Britain in recent weeks.The company put the total cost of clients’ claims in its home and commercial divisions at between £110m and £140m. This was less than analysts had feared, and the company’s shares rose 2% to 369.6p. Continue reading...

The fuss over Sir Philip Dilley’s Caribbean holiday and subsequent resignation let the government off the hook over its failings on flood defencesSo Sir Philip Dilley is going to spend more time with his family, in whichever home he feels most comfortable. After misleading the public over his whereabouts over Christmas, as the north of England was awash with floods, he resigned as chair of the Environment Agency on Monday.As the rain fell on Boxing day, he said he was at home with his family. Then, having been tracked down to Barbados, he clarified that he was “at home with his family, who are from Barbados”. Now it appears his wife is actually from Jamaica, 1,200 miles away. Continue reading...

Some previous studies claiming that the climate is insensitive to carbon pollution missed a key factorClimate sensitivity – the amount of global surface warming we’ll see as a result of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels – has become contrarians’ favorite basis to argue against cutting carbon pollution. If the Earth’s climate is relatively insensitive to rising carbon levels, then it’s somewhat less urgent that we stop burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. However, a new NASA study indicates that’s not the case.