France, German states use wiretaps, GPS to track activists
Bavaria tries to stop protests with preventative detention
Berlin police spend more than 400,000 hours on climate cases
France outlaws one group, German states consider ban
BERLIN, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Simon Lachner had plans to glue himself to a German city thoroughfare in June to call public attention to climate change. Instead, he ended up in police custody before he’d even left his home.
Lachner, 28, is one of thousands of activists caught up in a European crackdown on a wave of direct action protests that gathered pace last year demanding urgent government action against climate change.
Roadblocks on major motorways in Britain have caused traffic chaos, protests at oil installations in Germany have disrupted supplies, and in France, thousands of activists and police clashed over water usage, leaving dozens injured.
Determined to prevent such protests from strengthening further, states in Germany and national authorities in France are invoking legal powers often used against organised crime and extremist groups to wiretap and track activists, Reuters found, based on conversations with four prosecutors, police in both countries and more than a dozen protesters.
In Berlin alone, police have spent hundreds of thousands of hours working on more than 4,500 incidents registered against the “The Last Generation” and “Extinction Rebellion” groups, according to previously unreported data from police.
State authorities in Germany are widely using preventative detention to stop people from protesting, including holding at least one person for as long as 30 days without charge, which is permissible under Bavarian law, the prosecutors consulted by Reuters said.
Lawmakers passed new surveillance and detention laws in France in July and in Britain in May, with Britain making it illegal to lock, or glue, yourself to property.
Britain and Switzerland among countries that need to adapt most for heating, says research looking at impact of 2C global rise
The UK and Switzerland will see a 30% increase in the number of days of uncomfortably hot temperatures if the world heats by 2C, and are two of the countries which need to adapt the most for global heating, scientists have predicted.
The research, published in Nature Sustainability on Thursday, found that while central Africa will see the most extreme temperatures overall, it is mostly northern European countries that will experience the greatest relative increases in uncomfortably hot days.
The people and infrastructure in these countries are not prepared for periods of hot weather, the study, based on climate modelling and data from the UK Met Office, predicts. The estimates by researchers at the University of Oxford are conservative, and do not include external factors such as extreme heatwaves, which would come on top of this average increase.
Norway will also suffer one of the world’s most dramatic increases in days that require cooling interventions, the study finds, with a 28% increase in days with uncomfortably hot temperatures if the world misses the 1.5C target. Eight of the 10 countries with the greatest relative increase in uncomfortably hot days are expected to be in northern Europe.
One of the most severe marine heatwaves on the planet is taking place in the shallow seas around the UK and Ireland. That’s according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has labelled this a “Category 4” heatwave. Rarely used outside of the tropics, a cat 4 heatwave means “extreme” heat.
Marine heatwaves are classified as “prolonged periods of anomalously high sea surface temperature”, when compared to the long-term average for that time of year. And thanks to measurements made by satellites orbiting the earth we know that, in some areas around the UK, surface water temperatures are 4°C to 5°C above normal for mid June.
This is extremely unusual: buoys around Ireland and the UK have been recording sea surface temperature for over 20 years, and in that time it has never been this hot this early in the summer.
The heatwave is strongest in the northern North Sea, northwest of Ireland, and the Celtic Sea between Cornwall and southern Ireland. However, in other areas, such as the southern North Sea, the English Channel and the southern Irish Sea, the surface temperatures are only a degree or so above normal.
The two regions are very different in oceanographic terms. The latter areas tend to be shallower (30-40 metres) with stronger tidal currents and so the water remains well mixed from the surface to the sea bed, all year around. In contrast, the regions where the heatwave is strongest are deeper (80-100 metres) with weaker tidal currents. As the mixing is weaker these seas “stratify” each summer, with a layer of warmer water overlying the cooler deeper layer.
In these seasonally stratifying regions the heat from the sun only warms the relatively shallow surface layer, while in the mixed regions the sun’s impact is diluted as its heat is mixed through the ocean from seabed to surface.
Oceans are slow to warm up and cool down
The temperature of the atmosphere can vary a lot day to day. You might find yourself wearing a jumper on Monday but shorts and a t-shirt by Wednesday. But oceans are different – their ability to absorb lots of heat means temperature varies slowly and extremes are rare.
In seasonally stratified regions the stratification starts to develop in late May, with the maximum sea surface temperatures happening in August. At these locations you would still only expect the temperature to vary by 10°C or so over the whole year (in contrast with the atmosphere where such shifts happen in a matter of hours).
In this latest heatwave, the sea surface is up to 5°C warmer than normal two months before we’d expect to see the maximum temperatures.
North Atlantic temperature patterns
Across the North Atlantic, the sea surface is warming faster than ever before (thick black line = 2023; orange = 2022; grey lines = 1981-2019) NOAA / climatereanalyzer.org, CC BY-SA
I would speculate part of the reason for these anomalously high temperatures in stratified seas is that the surface layer is shallower than usual and so the sun’s heat is more concentrated (probably a result of relatively stable weather and lack of Atlantic storms crossing the UK in the past month). As such, these already very warm areas will warm further until a sufficiently strong storm comes along and mixes the heat down into a thicker surface layer.
Fish may go hungry
One reason this heatwave is so significant is because those stratified seas on the continental shelf around Britain and Ireland are some of the most biologically productive on the planet. They have long been an important area for fishing cod, haddock, mackerel and other species. Those fish eat smaller fish and crustaceans, which in turn feed on microscopic plants known as plankton.
At this time of year, these plankton are dependent on nutrients mixed up from the deep water into the surface layer. However, this year, this nutrient supply may be diminished, since the very high surface temperature means there is likely stronger stratification and less mixing.
A heatwave on the surface could potentially harm the deeper ocean too, and the fish that live there. These continental shelf seas are already suffering from a decline in deep water oxygen, which is partly offset by mixing oxygen-rich water from the surface. However, the fact that the surface temperatures are so high point to a lack of mixing between the layers, and in any case, warmer water contains less oxygen.
On a slightly longer timescale, we already know that climate change is affecting these seas. Some warm water fish species are appearing in UK waters for instance, and native fish reproduction cycles and those of the plankton they feed on are no longer in perfect sync. This extreme heatwave may be a sign of further changes to come.
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Government rule breaches are to blame for UK’s corruption nadir, says Transparency International
Image of Elmo and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson
openDemocracy’s revelations of corruption in UK public life have been cited in a damning new index that ranks perceptions of Britain’s transparency at an all-time low.
A ‘poll of polls’ by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) found industry experts think the UK is more corrupt than ever.
The UK’s CPI score is based on data from eight independent sources including the Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Economic Forum, who surveyed experts and business executives for their views on abuses of public office for private gain and bribery in the UK.
Britain scored 73 this year, down from 78 in 2022, on a scale where zero means a country is perceived as highly corrupt and 100 means it is perceived as very clean. The NGO cited several pieces of journalism by openDemocracy as partial explanation for the slump, which saw the UK tumble in the global rankings from 11th to 18th.
They include revelations in November 2021 that former Tory Party treasurers appeared to be guaranteed peerages so long as they donated more than £3m to the party.
openDemocracy was cited as revealing four of these breaches, one of which involved the government keeping large payments to the former prime minister Boris Johnson and other ministers secret for up to eight months.
Last year, the Cabinet Office insisted it would radically overhaul an ‘Orwellian’ government unit, almost two years after openDemocracy first revealed that it was vetting Freedom of Information requests.
Only five of the 180 countries assessed by Transparency for the 2022 Index saw their year-on-year scores drop by five or more points. The UK (-5) was joined by World Cup 2022 host Qatar (-5), Myanmar (-5), Azerbaijan (-7), and Oman (-8).
The countries perceived to be the least corrupt were Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, while those ranked most corrupt were South Sudan, Syria and Somalia.
Transparency International acknowledged that most countries at the bottom of its index were either currently experiencing conflict or had recently done so. It added that although most Western European countries had been ranked higher than African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries, they in fact played a central role in fostering global corruption.
“For decades, they have welcomed dirty money from abroad, allowing kleptocrats to increase their wealth, power and destructive geopolitical ambitions,” the report said.
