Public help needed for Lincolnshire Big Butterfly Count
"Butterflies and moths are beautiful and vital pollinators. Their numbers reflect the health of our environment and they have decreased significantly since the 1970s," he said."Butterfly declines are also an early warning for other wildlife losses. Butterflies are key biodiversity indicators for scientists as they react very quickly to changes in their environment. "So, if their numbers are falling, then nature is in trouble."The Humberston Fitties event takes place on 18 July from 10:00 to 12:00 BST, with the Cleethorpes Country Park event between 10:00 and 12:00 on 21 July.People across the county can take part in the count, even if they do not attend one of the events. Participants are asked to count the number of butterflies, including species, they see in a 15 minute period and send the results to the Big Butterfly Count website.Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
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The Herald Scotland
17 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Public urged to look out for exotic Jersey Tiger moths in parks and gardens
The initiative, which takes place over three weeks in summer and is currently under way until August 10, gets members of the public to spend 15 minutes recording those they see in their garden, parks or countryside. This year, the charity is urging people to take part in what it describes it as a 'nationwide rescue mission' for the UK's ailing butterfly species. A Jersey Tiger spotted in a garden (Mark Parsons/Butterfly Conservation/PA) As the count reached its mid-way point, Butterfly Conservation said people have recorded seeing 5,300 Jersey Tiger moths, compared with a total of 3,496 for the whole of last summer's count. This marks a 78% rise from 2024 when measured as an average per county, with the increase attributed to the warm, dry conditions, which likely helped the species spread their wings in abundance and settle in parts of the UK they usually would not. The moths are recognisable by their black and white tiger stripe forewings and vibrant red-orange or yellow hindwings adorned with bold black spots. Butterfly Conservation said the Jersey Tiger was largely restricted to the Channel Islands, the south coast of England, London and south-east Wales just a decade ago. But now they are frequently spotted across southern England and are continuing to spread through East Anglia and into the Midlands, with the charity saying they have been photographed this year in Cardiff, Birmingham, Cambridgeshire and Essex. Children taking part in The Big Butterfly Count (Butterfly Conservation/PA) It comes in the wake of last year's record low numbers which were partly down to the wet spring and cool summer but conservationists warned they come on top of long-term declines in the UK. More than 80% of butterfly species have declined since the 1970s, with experts warning they have been hit by damage to their habitats, climate change and the use of pesticides. Butterfly Conservation said that while the looks of Jersey Tiger moths have caught the public's attention this year, sightings in unexpected places also tell an important story about climate change. Dr Richard Fox, the charity's head of science, said: 'Butterfly and moth numbers fluctuate naturally each year depending on the weather, and this summer's warm, sunny conditions have created a much more favourable environment than last year's cool, wet season, which saw numbers recorded during Big Butterfly Count plunge to record lows. 'It's certainly uplifting to see more butterflies and moths this summer, but one good year can't undo the long-term decline many species are facing.' A Common Blue butterfly (Butterfly Conservation/PA) Dr Fox said populations peaks during good years have grown smaller over the past five years, while bad years have seen low numbers dip further. He added that the increase in Jersey Tiger moth sightings is an example of how climate change 'is reshaping the distribution of wildlife'. 'While it's a delight to spot such a vibrant moth in gardens, parks and green spaces, it's also a reminder of how rising temperatures are altering our natural environment,' he said. 'This is why the Big Butterfly Count matters. The more people who take part, the more we can learn about how species are adapting, or struggling, in the face of climate change and extreme weather.' Data collected by members of the public during the Big Butterfly Count directly informs national conservation strategies, helping protect not just butterflies and moths, but the wider ecosystems they support.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
Enough doom-mongering about climate change
As a student, Johannes Ackva wore a hair shirt so itchy and uncomfortable that even Greta Thunberg might have approved. The young, idealistic German limited his use of water, stuck to a strict vegetarian diet, refused to drive and flew as little as possible. But, two decades on, Ackva, who works as a climate researcher, has changed his views considerably. He remains concerned about the environment and he still doesn't drive or eat meat. But there is cause, he believes, for optimism. Two things have changed since his hair-shirt days, he says. One is that the data looks a little less bleak than it used to. Instead of predicting that global temperatures are likely to increase by between 1.5°C (the best case) and 4.5°C (the worst), as it did for many years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now says the increase will be between 2.5°C and 4°C. That 0.5°C reduction in the worst-case scenario makes a substantial difference – and itself represents a significant reduction from the 8°C rise that had, in the Noughties, been predicted by scientists such as James Lovelock for the world's temperate region. 'You have to be more optimistic than you would have been 10 years ago,' Ackva says, 'and even five years ago.' And the second thing that has changed, according to Ackva, is the rate of technological progress: 'We can see from what we've been doing with solar, or with electric cars, that we know how to fundamentally solve this problem.' The most rapid energy transition in history The price of solar energy has fallen almost at the speed of light; solar panel costs have fallen 90 per cent in the past decade alone. Renewables are helping to push coal and natural gas out of power grids. In 2009, 74 per cent of British electricity came from fossil fuels; in 2023, it was only a third. Over the same period, the share of British electricity coming from renewable sources (solar, wind etc.) has gone from two per cent to 40 per cent. In short, we are living through the most rapid energy transition in history. It is incomplete because renewables are dependent on the sun shining and the wind blowing, and because we do not have adequate battery technology to store vast amounts of electrical energy for months at a time. And, of course, it is expensive because of all the infrastructure that needs building, be it car-charging facilities, wind farms, or the apparatus that connects both of these things and more to our power grids. However, the recent progress in the energy transition is demonstrative of a truth that many environmental activists – groups like Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and the new Youth Demand – would prefer to ignore. Because, while they advocate for 'degrowth', whereby we shrink our economy and consume less in order to constrain our emissions, the innovation of recent years suggests the opposite is true: that it is investment and economic growth that will improve lives worldwide and solve the crisis. I spoke to Ackva during my research for a book about people who have dedicated their careers to saving the world from catastrophe, The Anti-Catastrophe League. He works at a non-profit organisation called Founders Pledge, where his research guides the philanthropy of entrepreneurs who want to use their wealth to address the climate crisis. And degrowth organisations are not the kind that he recommends his philanthropists support. Instead, he recommends that they fund innovation: inventions, and government action, that take the battle beyond wind farms and electric cars. 'We need to make sure that we also do it for cement, that we do it for [the manufacture of] steel, that we do it for long-range transport,' he says. 'But this is not rocket science. This is, in principle, doable.' It has been doable for longer than we might care to admit. After the Second World War, governments on either side of the Iron Curtain built nuclear power stations by the dozen. But nuclear power stations are gargantuan structures, complete with puffing chimneys atop blue-glowing reactors, and they are expensive to build. They also produce radioactive waste. This effluent is relatively unproblematic in itself, but conceptually unattractive to the public. Even more unattractive is the concept of nuclear meltdown. Chernobyl's death toll, including deaths from the explosion and acute radiation sickness within the first few months, is estimated to have been 30 to 60 people. These figures are lower than one might imagine but the victims of the Chernobyl disaster stick much more indelibly in the mind than do the abstract millions who die of fossil fuel-related air pollution each year. Despite the Chernobyl disaster, and despite smaller events at Fukushima and Three Mile Island, nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels. The use of nuclear energy results in 99.8 per cent fewer deaths than does the use of coal; 99.7 per cent fewer than oil and 97.6 per cent fewer than gas. We can predict with some confidence that fossil fuels will be thoroughly outmoded over the course of the 21st century. It is important that governments continue to underwrite what Ackva calls 'big bets'. Fusion technology, for instance, stands a much better chance of working if, through being given public funding, it is given the gift of time. Once a technology outperforms fossil fuels, though, it will need no subsidy. We will need no carbon taxes, nor carbon credits. Thanks to far-sighted government support, the market has greedily adopted solar power and electric vehicles. Further greedy adoptions are inevitable. Bettering the miracle of fossil fuels is a lofty goal, but one that humanity is likely to meet. That still leaves a serious problem unsolved. That problem is the warming (1.17°C / 2.11°F) that has already occurred – and the warming that we are due from the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Many people are trying to prevent the temperature from rising in the future; very few are trying to reverse the heating that has already occurred. But a small minority is attempting to do just that: the environmental dark wizards. Speaking with Andrew Song, he rejects the pieties of climate change. 'A lot of people were indoctrinated,' he tells me, 'including myself. I was an American boy scout, thinking: 'I just need to recycle and recycle and plant some trees, and I'm good.'' But these soothing instructions, Song came to realise, were 'all a f—ing lie!'. Telling me the story, he bursts into laughter. And he is right: recycling, in some respects, is overrated. It will not solve the climate crisis. Song has helped start several businesses in San Francisco. While enrolled in Y-Combinator, the prestigious accelerator for start-ups, Song met Luke Iseman. This was in 2016; after some false starts, Iseman said: 'Andrew, I've just learnt about stratospheric aerosol injection.' Stratospheric aerosol injection is the method by which we might be able to reduce the heat of the planet. It is achieved by launching sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Here sulphur dioxide reacts with other gases to form sulphate aerosols, which are fine particles. These fine particles reflect the Sun's light back into space. And the more light is reflected back into space, the less it warms the Earth. But there are downsides. The term 'uncontrolled termination' describes the scenario in which humanity starts a massive project of stratospheric aerosol injection, then abruptly stops. It is thought that this would result in ' termination shock ', whereby the temperature would swiftly rebound. Such a rebound would result in much more disruption of weather and ecology than would a more gradual rise in temperatures. And termination shock is far from the only reason to be wary of stratospheric aerosol injection. It could deplete the ozone layer. It could cause acid rain. It could have various other unintended effects. And it would not address air pollution, acidification of the oceans, and other nasty effects of the burning of fossil fuels. Instead, stratospheric aerosol injection might encourage us to stick with our bad habits. In April 2022, Iseman launched his first balloons, releasing them from his home in Baja California, Mexico. By the following February, Time magazine was calling him 'an innovator, renegade, or charlatan, depending on who you ask, but certainly the biggest climate tech trouble-maker in recent memory.' He and Song incorporated Make Sunsets, their new company, that October. Having been ticked off by the government of Mexico, they currently operate a patch of hilly Californian scrubland owned by Iseman. Journalists tagging along with Iseman and Song have witnessed a homebrew operation that resembles some of the more chaotic scenes from the TV series Breaking Bad: two rascals taking an RV to the wilderness in order to cook up something that most observers would probably call deeply irresponsible. Song, a talented marketer, tends to liken stratospheric aerosol injection to sunscreen. As he pointed out to me, humanity already puts 60 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the troposphere each year. Song and Iseman propose simply to put a much smaller amount of the chemical compound a little higher up. In Song's view, we have been misapplying our sunscreen. We have been 'just spraying the sunscreen lotion on our face, but with our mouths open. And since some of that is being swallowed, we're getting sick off it.' As for the ozone layer, Iseman and Song refer to evidence that its depletion will be comparatively small. Song does accept there is a risk of acid rain, but he argues that the risks of inaction are even greater. His view is that we should be less precious about geoengineering. 'We've injected two trillion tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere since the 1870s,' he says. 'So are we suddenly drawing a line of where we can deploy these aerosols? Literally, as we speak, we're emitting CO2, geoengineering the Earth, even just by breathing.' Global buy-in required Another difficulty, though, is that stratospheric geoengineering will require global buy-in. Or will it? Perhaps it is naive to imagine that solar geoengineering will occur after diplomatic efforts rather than before. As the climate expert Ben James writes: 'I find it impossible to imagine a UN mechanism approving something so universally contentious. Rather, someone will probably just do it.' Stratospheric aerosol injection, like nuclear fission, is a technology to which we already have access. And there are several more under development and notable for their promise. An American startup, Terraform Industries, demonstrated last year that it could produce synthetic natural gas from sunlight, water, and airborne carbon dioxide. In other words, the prototype can conjure some of the world's best-performing fuel from almost nothing. It is also possible that we will be able to take not only energy from the air, but pollution. Via carbon capture, we can remove fossil fuel-generated pollutants from the atmosphere, though we have not yet worked out how to do this in an energy-efficient manner. However, the technology I consider the most underrated involves not the air above us, but the ground below us. Today, geothermal power, which harnesses the heat of the Earth's core, constitutes a sliver of global energy production: an estimated 0.35 per cent. The figure seems even more meagre when one considers that an infinitesimal fraction of the Earth's geothermal heat, a tenth of one percent of that heat, goes the calculation, would power humanity's current outgoings for 20 million years. As it stands, we use geothermal power only where that heat happens to be closer to the surface than usual. Volcanic areas are useful in this regard. The hot springs of Bath are a less dramatic example. Elsewhere, geothermal power is harder to exploit. The idea is that you pump water down one well, bring it up via an adjacent well, and use that hot water to power turbines or heat buildings. We can drill deep enough, several kilometres down, to reach rock the temperature of a boiling kettle, or even a heated oven, but it's expensive, and can cause mild tremors. Moreover, to pay back that up-front cost, geothermal systems need to produce heat for years – which, given how hard it is to know what's going on several kilometres down, presents yet further difficulty. For that reason, this promising technology has been far less attractive an investment than drilling for fossil fuels, and has therefore remained underdeveloped. Necessity is forcing us into action. So is new technology. Commissioned by a think tank, I spent much of last year examining the performance of FORGE, the US government's geothermal field laboratory, in Utah. The lab shares its results and allows companies to visit and test their gear. Its drilling speed had increased fivefold between 2017 and 2022 and costs had fallen by as much as 50 per cent from 2022 onward. As all of FORGE's research was public, the entire geothermal industry could benefit from it. FORGE is working on 'enhanced geothermal', which employs techniques imported from the fracking industry. Likewise, the oil and gas industry has pioneered 'directional drilling', which is now allowing geothermal projects to drill not just vertically, but laterally, thus making it possible to create underground structures resembling radiators. Even more thrillingly for fanboys of geothermal power, Quaise, another company, is trying to go even deeper, which would enable it to access heat that can give water the energy density of natural gas. Quaise's method is to vapourise rock using a millimetre wave, which is something akin to a transparent laser. The company was founded by Carlos Araque, a disenchanted oil and gas engineer, advised by Paul Woskov, a fusion scientist. They must solve a litany of technical problems. But if they are successful, they could unlock a power source that would leave fossil fuels outmoded and make fusion an irrelevance. Due to advanced geothermal being in the category of those 'big bets', that would be a vindication of Ackva's approach. We failed to make the most of nuclear power; we might shy away from stratospheric aerosol injections; but to start to turn the situation around, we might need only one of those big bets to pay off.
The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
What medieval skeletons tell us about long-term health and life expectancy
Beneath churchyards in London and Lincolnshire lie the chemical echoes of famine, infection and survival preserved in the teeth of those who lived through some of the most catastrophic periods in English history. In a new study, my colleagues and I examined over 270 medieval skeletons to investigate how early-life malnutrition affected long-term health and life expectancy. We focused on people who lived through the devastating period surrounding the Black Death (1348-1350), which included years of famine during the Little Ice Age and the great bovine pestilence (an epidemic that killed two-thirds of cattle in England and Wales). We found that the biological scars of childhood deprivation during this time left lasting marks on the body. These findings suggest that early nutritional stress, whether in the 14th century or today, can have consequences that endure well beyond childhood. Children's teeth act like tiny time capsules. The hard layer inside each tooth, called dentine, sits beneath the enamel and forms while we're growing up. Once formed, it stays unchanged for life, creating a permanent record of what we ate and experienced. As our teeth develop, they absorb different chemical versions (isotopes) of carbon and nitrogen from our food, and these get locked into the tooth structure. This means scientists can read the story of someone's childhood diet by analysing their teeth. A method of measuring the chemical changes in sequential slices of the teeth is a recent advance used to identify dietary changes in past populations with greater accuracy. When children are starving, their bodies break down their fat stores and muscle to continue growing. This gives a different signature in the newly formed dentine than the isotopes from food. These signatures make centuries-old famines visible today, showing exactly how childhood trauma affected health in medieval times. We identified a distinctive pattern that had been seen before in victims of the great Irish famine. Normally, when people eat a typical diet, the levels of carbon and nitrogen in their teeth move in the same direction. For example, both might rise or fall together if someone eats more plants or animals. This is called 'covariance' because the two markers vary together. But during starvation, nitrogen levels in the teeth rise while carbon levels stay the same or drop. This opposite movement – called 'opposing covariance' – is like a red flag in the teeth that shows when a child was starving. These patterns helped us pinpoint the ages at which people experienced malnutrition. Lifelong legacy Children who survived this period reached adulthood during the plague years, and the effect on their growth was recorded in the chemical signals in their teeth. People with famine markers in their dentine had different mortality rates than those who lacked these markers. Children who are nutritionally deprived have poorer outcomes in later life: studies of modern children have suggested that children of low birth weight or who suffer stresses during the first 1,000 days of life have long-term effects on their health. For example, babies born small, a possible sign of nutritional stress, seem to be more prone to illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes in adulthood than the population at large. These characteristics can also be passed to future offspring through changes in how genes are switched on or off, known as 'epigenetic effects' – which can endure for three generations. In medieval England, early nutritional deprivation may have been beneficial during catastrophic times by producing adults of short stature and the capacity to store fat, but these people were much more likely to die after the age of 30 than their peers with healthy childhood dentine patterns. The patterns for childhood starvation increased in the decades leading up to the Black Death and declined after 1350. This suggests the pandemic may have indirectly improved living conditions by reducing population pressure and increasing access to food. The medieval teeth tell us something urgent about today. Right now, millions of children worldwide are experiencing the same nutritional crises that scarred those long-dead English villagers – whether from wars in Gaza and Ukraine or poverty in countless countries. Their bodies are writing the same chemical stories of survival into their growing bones and teeth, creating biological problems that will emerge decades later as heart disease, diabetes and early death. Our latest findings aren't just historical curiosities; they're an urgent warning that the children we fail to nourish today will carry those failures in their bodies for life and pass them on to their own children. The message from the medieval graves couldn't be clearer: feed the children now or pay the price for generations. Julia Beaumont is a Researcher in Biological Anthropology at the University of Bradford.
