Incredible footage from the CBC show The Nature of Thing of a Great Gray Owl hunting voles burrowing in the snow, relying almost exclusively on its incredible sense of hearing. And specially adapted feathers that allow it to swoop in in dead silence.
Via kottke.org.
Student protests in France over school conditions that began about a month ago continued to spread across much of the country today, here in Nice included.
Continue readingA family of Barn Owls has taken up residence on a rooftop on New York City’s Upper West Side. The family includes adolescents who are learning to fly.
The owls begin their evenings at about 7:45 p.m. with a series of screeches, Ms. Williams said. The adolescents hop along the water tower’s roof and take short test flights. Then the adults depart. Sometimes, they perch on sections of the Kenilworth Building on Central Park West, scanning alleys and the park for mice and rats. When they return with food, the children hop with excitement. By 10 p.m., the horrifying screeches begin to quiet.
Last night’s waxing crescent moon, from the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.
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In the Giacometti Hall at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, pictured above, Alberto Giacometti’s “Walking Man” appears to be entering from the lush woods beyond the glass. The image doesn’t quite do justice to the work—or to its stunning setting beside the Garden Lake, just a few metres away.
It’s an apt image for a museum, located in the quiet town of Humlebæk just north of Copenhagen, that feels less like a conventional gallery and more like a journey through art, architecture and landscape.
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Celebrating World Migratory Bird Day with these small waders at the Embouchure du Var in southeastern France.
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And a coffee, too.
Continue reading.. And the second consecutive month with temperatures more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level, reports the Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation and monitoring programme. For Europe as a whole, it was the third-warmest September on record, and the joint warmest for western Europe.
Here in Europe:
Outside of Europe:
In the oceans:
And the intensification of El Niño:
The full release is here.
Litija station, central Slovenia.
Continue readingBelow, from a Guardian analysis of the Carbon Impacts Tracer, a new tool developed by the Australian National University and the Lethal Humidity Global Council that helps visualise the connection between CO₂ emissions from specific fossil fuel projects or companies and their attributable climate impacts by translating abstract emission quantities into tangible consequences, using peer-reviewed scientific relationships:
The biggest coal project before authorities in New South Wales, the Hunter Valley Operations mine, will emit the equivalent of about 809m tonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide if it wins approval.
That number, for most people, will carry little meaning, as might the calculation that adding that amount of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere will cause an extra 0.00036C of global heating.
But what if the public was instead told that that amount of carbon dioxide would expose almost half a million people to unprecedented heat, or kill nearly 15 million coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef every time it bleaches, or lead to more than 100 additional deaths from heatwaves in Europe to the end of this century.
I’ll give it a test drive over the weekend.
Link.
For Wordless Wednesday.
Continue readingGoodell, author of ‘The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet’ argues that no matter how the US Supreme Court rules in a liability lawsuit brought against Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy by the city of Boulder, it will not kill attempts to hold those responsible for the impact of climate change accountable.
In fact, he writes, “the age of accountability for the fossil fuel industry has just begun and has a bright future. The reason for that is the emergence of a powerful field of climate science known as attribution science”, which measures how much human-caused climate change influences the frequency, intensity, and likelihood of specific extreme weather events. [Here is a Union of Concerned Scientists piece with a longer explanation on how it works.]
The simple truth is, the climate accountability genie is out of the bottle, and the Supreme Court is unlikely to jam it back in. Even if the court sides with Suncor, attribution science will continue to move forward, filling in the gaps between cause and effect in our understanding of how climate works.
And
In the end, the promise of attribution science is that it helps us see a storm or a heat wave or a flood not as an act of a god or the whim of Mother Nature, but as a disaster that has been knowingly shaped or intensified by particular human actions. And by identifying perpetrators and victims, it transforms the question of who should pay for climate damages into a moral question as much as a legal one.
Related coverage on the case:
According to Merlin, Guineafowl “often behave like lunatics, charging around issuing a loud and distinctive “kek-kek-kek-kraaaaah” alarm”. I know a few people like that. And I think I’ve come up with a new nickname for them.
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Capturing the last sounds of a disappearing rainforest.
Continue readingLots of people I know are feeling this way.
In a NYT op-ed headlined ‘I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.’, Bill Mckibben writes:
Psychologists have claimed that evolutionary biology leaves humans ill equipped to deal with giant, slow-moving problems. But suddenly we live in a moment when problems are speeding and piling up.
The climate crisis now consists of walls of water sweeping down Nepali rivers, obliterating entire towns in the blink of an eye, and wildfires that wipe out California neighborhoods in hours. And we’re confronting the birth and Bunyanesque growth of a new technology, artificial intelligence, that, according to some of its creators, is fairly likely to kill us all in the near future. We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their companies’ initial public offerings.
Six of the biggest fossil fuel companies are projected to earn $2,967 a second in profits in 2026, new Oxfam research finds, ahead of the first global conference this week on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This marks an increase of almost $37 million a day compared to the 2025 profits of these six corporations – Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and TotalEnergies. Their total projected fossil fuel profits of 2026 are $94 billion: enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.
And concludes:
.. if human survival and economic resilience are important goals, so is a world calm enough to meet the needs of the human nervous system. We can’t keep on like this — it’s simply inhuman. We’re creating a world that’s fit only for something artificial.
A handful of shots from a 19-hour visit to Bologna last week. Above is Diavolessa, a female devil/gargoyle whose menacing wrought-iron visage stands guard under the portico of the former Ospedale degli Innocenti, the city’s one-time orphanage.
Continue readingA good summary by Bob Berwyn of the Copernicus Summer 2026 report released yesterday, on a summer of “record heat, severe drought and compounding impacts that tested Europe’s infrastructure and resilience” that affected just about everything, including “water supplies, energy systems, transport, ecosystems and agriculture, along with human health”.
Link.
In their report on the Copernicus Summer Review 2026, Le Monde notes the EU’s inability to act on climate, in spite of EU Commision President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledgment that “On climate change, this summer was the summer of truth.”
“One of the defining characteristics of summer this year is that it was not a single record; it was multiple records,” said Samantha Burgess, climate strategy lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “We’ve seen these compound impacts of climate change where we’ve seen record heat, record dryness, record wildfire risk.”
But at the EU’s political level, nothing, other than an absence of any real shock.
“There was no reaction; the climate issue is not among the priorities,” said Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, head of the energy center at the Institut Jacques Delors.
Link.
All the energy used by the earth’s entire population in one year all adds up to about half of a zettajoule.
A record-breaking 23 zettajoules of heat was sunk into the world’s seas last year, leaving ocean waters hotter, higher and less hospitable, a report has found.
The explosive addition of thermal energy, which was almost 40 times greater than all the energy humanity used that year, comes amid far-reaching changes to the deep water bodies fundamental to life on Earth.
Sea levels have risen by about 3.8mm per year since 1999, and at a faster rate of 4.2mm per year between 2012 and 2025, according to the 10th edition of the Copernicus ocean state report. It found the global ocean has become 17% more acidic in the last 40 years.
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The scientists found a clear acceleration of sea level rise in the western Mediterranean, even as the eastern part showed uneven gains. The entire sea has warmed by 0.32C per decade, the report found, driving up marine heatwaves, particularly in the last few years.
The report comes as western Europe experiences an unusually warm September right after its ruinously fiery summer, with temperatures hitting 40C highs in parts of Spain and Portugal last week. Hot coastal waters exacerbate heatwaves on land by adding heat during nights that would otherwise cool down.
Link.
More specifically, one of the first images I snapped with my new-to-me-then Sigma 150-600 zoom, which happened to be a Red-Backed Shrike.
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