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Snake, which measured 18.8ft and weighed 128lbs, was caught alongside rural road in Miami Dade county

Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19ft (5.8m) long has been captured in Florida.

It's a new record for the longest Burmese python caught in the wild in Florida. The previous record was a 17ft 7in python caught in August in Everglades national park.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the 18ft 8in snake was caught May 11 alongside a road in rural Miami-Dade County.

Wildlife officials said Monday that a Miami man spotted about 3ft of the snake sticking out of the roadside brush. He grabbed it and started dragging it into the open. When the snake began to wrap itself around his leg, he called to his friends for help and then used a knife to kill it.

The python weighed 128lb (58kg).

• Wildlife
• Animals
• United States
• Florida

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Complete set of Grand Inga dams on the Congo River would generate a massive 40,000MW of electricity

The dream of harnessing the mighty Congo with the world's largest set of dams has moved closer, with the World Bank and other financial institutions expected to offer finance and South Africa agreeing to buy half of the power generated.

In the past 60 years French, Belgian, Chinese, Brazilian and African engineers have all hoped to dam the river.

But decades of civil war, corruption, and the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) reputation as a failed state have limited the hydropower developments at the country's Inga Falls to two relatively small dams, built in 1972 and 1982. These, known as Inga 1 and 2, have a theoretical capacity of 1,400 megawatts but produce about half that.

A new $20bn (£13.2bn) development to generate a further 4,800MW was announced over the weekend in Paris, with work planned to start in October 2015. According to the DRC government, working with European and other consultants, five further stages at Inga Falls could eventually have a capacity of 40,000MW – equivalent to more than 20 large nuclear power stations.

This would make the complete Grand Inga development the largest hydro project in the world, generating twice as much as the Three Gorges dam in China. In theory, say its backers, it could provide 40% of Africa's electricity needs.

The attraction of developing hydropower on the Congo, says the government, is that unlike most of the world's great dam projects, it would not require tens of thousands of people to be relocated, nor would it block the river and result in significant environmental consequences. Because the Congo River around Inga is so vast and falls nearly 100 metres over a short distance, water can be diverted to create a massive new lake without disturbing its main flow.

"The impact on land use is very limited. The development can be progressive and carried out in a series of further phases, eventually providing 40,000MW of power," says the technical data for the proposed development.

The African Development Bank, World Bank, French Development Agency, European Investment Bank and Development Bank of South Africa have all shown interest in financing the next stage of the project. No developer has been chosen but Chinese, Korean and Spanish companies are said to be in the forefront.

Key to the project is South Africa's commitment this week to buy 2,500MW of capacity. "We have affirmed our commitment to the project by already provisioning for this purchase in our budgetary plan," said a South Africa ministry of energy official, Garrith Bezuidenhoudt.

But the prospect of local people getting power from Inga in the next 20 years is remote. Less than 10% of the population has electricity, with nearly all Inga 1 and 2 power going directly to multinational mining companies in the Katanga "copper belt". It is expected most Inga 3 power would travel 1,500 miles to power-hungry South Africa or large mines in DRC.

Giant hydropower schemes in Africa have a poor track record. "Projects such as Inga 1 and 2 have not unleashed economic development, but have been major contributors to African countries' unsustainable debt burden," said the US-based International Rivers network, which has led opposition to major dams around the world for 20 years.

In a letter last week to the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, the International Rivers and 18 other civil society organisations and networks from Africa, Europe and the US said the reality of large-scale dams seldom matched their expectations, mostly adding to debt problems and allowing powerful companies to cheaply exploit and export Africa's vast natural resources.

According to the groups, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found that because of the continent's low population density, grid-based electrification – including through large hydropower projects – is not cost-effective for much of rural Sub-Saharan Africa.

The letter said: "Renewable energy solutions such as wind, solar and micro hydropower projects are much more effective at reaching the rural poor.

"According to the IEA report, 70% of the world's unelectrified rural areas are best served through mini-grids or off-grid solutions.

"In the DRC, the World Bank and other financiers have invested billions… in the construction and rehabilitation of the Inga 1 and 2 hydropower projects and associated transmission lines over the past 40 years.

"After all this investment, 85% of the electricity in the DRC is consumed by high-voltage users, while only 6-9% of the population has access to electricity. We are concerned that the bank's proposed focus on large hydropower projects will write off electricity access for the majority of Africa's poor."

• Hydropower
• Rivers
• Energy
• Renewable energy
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Africa

John Vidal
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The government is hoping to protect the UK's trees from the many life-threatening diseases and insects that are making their way into Britain. But is there really anything we can do?

Hot on the heels of ash dieback, it seems that sweet chestnuts are now under threat. This week, the UK government announced that it was to ban imports of sweet chestnut saplings from foreign nurseries in an effort to stop the spread of a fungal blight that is already killing chestnuts across Europe and North America and now threatens the UK's estimated 44m specimens. An infection of the blight - known as Cryphonectria parasitica - is usually fatal to sweet chestnuts. It causes a characteristic bright brown cankered bark, in contrast to the greenish colour of normal bark. After it was first detected in North America in the 1930s it went on to kill an estimated 3.5 billion trees within 20 years.

The news comes just months after the government banned the import of ash saplings in the – some say – now forlorn hope of preventing the spread of a fungal disease known as "ash dieback". With other tree diseases also in the news – the oak processionary moth has been detected in the Greater London area and Berkshire – there is a swelling sense that many tree species are facing an existential threat.

Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, this week announced that a national plant health risk register is to be established, following the recommendation of a biosecurity taskforce he had convened in light of the onset of ash dieback. But which trees are next in line for some life-threatening blight? The taskforce's report contains a list of exotically named "potential threats" yet to be detected in the UK, including the "eight-toothed Europe spruce bark beetle", citrus longhorned beetle, red oak borer, oak wilt, pine processionary moth, plane wilt (which has affected 80% of plane trees in some parts of France), pine pitch canker and brown spot needle blight. And what elms still remain in the UK could be finished off by the zigzag elm sawfly, which has "spread quickly" from Asia into continental Europe.

"There are a variety of pests and diseases already in the UK and many more on the continent heading our way, but the biggest threat to UK trees could be one we don't currently know about," says Austin Brady, head of conservation at the Woodland Trust. "It's hard to predict how pests and diseases present elsewhere might behave on reaching the UK. Sudden oak death is a good example of this as it affects oak trees in the US, but it is now spreading via rhododendrons and having a devastating affect on Japanese larch trees in the UK."

Variety is the best defence, says Brady. Identifying and planting a single, seemingly resistant species might prove futile in the long run: "It is important to be vigilant, look after our trees and, when planting, ensure a mix of species is used so that we build resilient landscapes that can withstand future threats."

• Trees and forests
• Ash dieback
• Invasive species
• Wildlife
• Conservation

Leo Hickman
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The Oklahoma twister was a 'classic look', but the data shows we are experiencing more volatility in the US tornado season

• Follow all the latest in our Oklahoma live blog

Global climate change and politics are linked to each other – for better or worse. No clearer was that the case than when Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island gave an impassioned speech on global warming in the aftermath of Monday's deadly Oklahoma tornado, and the conservative media ripped him. Whitehouse implied that at least part of the blame for the deadly tornado should be laid at the feet of climate change.

Is Whitehouse correct? It's difficult to assign any one storm's outcome to the possible effects of global climate change, and the science of tornadoes in particular makes it pretty much impossible to know whether Whitehouse is right.

Let's start with the basics of what causes a tornado. A piece from my friend (and sometimes co-chatter) Andrew Freedman two years ago sets out the basics well.

First, you need warm, humid air for moisture. The past few days in Moore have featured temperatures in the upper 70s to low 80s, with relative humidity levels regularly hitting between 90% and 100% and rarely dropping below 70%.

Second, you need strong jet stream winds to provide lift. As this map from Weather Underground indicates, there were definitely some very strong jet stream winds on Monday in the Oklahoma region.

Third, you need strong wind shear (changing wind directions and/or speeds at different heights) to allow for full instability and lift. This mid-level wind shear map from the University of Wisconsin shows that there were 45 to 50 knot winds, right at the top of the scale, over Oklahoma on Monday.

Fourth, you need something to ignite the storm. In this case, a frontal boundary, as seen in this Weather Channel map, draped across central Oklahoma, did the trick.

The point is that all the normal ingredients were there that allowed an EF-4 tornado to spawn and strike. (Examination of the storm site may cause an upgrading to EF-5.) It happened in tornado alley, where warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico often meets dry air from the north and Rocky mountains for maximum instability. There wasn't anything shocking about this from a meteorological perspective. It was, as a well-informed friend said, a "classic" look.

The long-term weather question is whether or not we'll see more or less of these "classic" looks in our changing meteorological environment. It turns out that of all the weather phenomena, from droughts to hurricanes, tornadoes are the most complex to answer from a broader atmospheric trends point of view. The reason is that a warming world affects the factors that lead to tornadoes in different ways.

Climate change is supposed, among other things, to bring warmer and moister air to earth. That, of course, would lead to more severe thunderstorms and probably more tornadoes. The issue is that global warming is also forecast to bring about less wind shear. This would allow hurricanes to form more easily, but it also would make it much harder for tornadoes to get the full about lift and instability that allow for your usual thunderstorm to grow in height and become a fully-fledged tornado. Statistics over the past 50 years bear this out, as we've seen warmer and more moist air as well as less wind shear.

Meteorological studies differ on whether or not the warmer and moister air can overcome a lack of wind shear in creating more tornadoes in the far future. In the immediate past, the jet stream, possibly because of climate change, has been quite volatile. Some years it has dug south to allow maximum tornado activity in the middle of the country, while other years it has stayed to the north.

Although tornado reporting has in prior decades been not as reliable as today because of a lack of equipment and manpower, it's still not by accident that the six least active and four most active tornado seasons have been felt over the past decade. Another statistic that points to the irregular patterns is that the three earliest and four latest starts to the tornado season have all occurred in the past 15 years.

Basically, we've had this push and pull in recent history. Some years the number of tornadoes is quite high, and some years it is quite low. We're not seeing "average" seasons as much any more, though the average of the extremes has led to no meaningful change to the average number of tornadoes per year. Expect this variation to continue into the future as less wind shear and warmer moister air fight it out.

The overall result could very well be fewer days of tornadoes per Harold Brooks of the National Storm Center, but more and stronger tornadoes when they do occur. Nothing about the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, or tornadoes over the past few decades break with this theory.

None of it proves or disproves senator Whitehouse's beliefs either. Indeed, we'll never know whether larger global warming factors were at play in Monday's storms. All we can do at this moment is react to them and give the people of Oklahoma all the help they need.

• Oklahoma City tornado
• Oklahoma
• Tornadoes
• United States
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• US weather
• Climate change

Harry J Enten
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Despite billions in profits, the problem of poverty remains largely unresolved in one of the world's least developed countries

Félicité sees nothing unreasonable about her demands. Seated in one of the few shady spots in her yard, she details what she would like to obtain for her family: a decent wage, enough to eat, a health service and cheap building materials so everyone can have a home. "And school really free of charge for all children," adds this resident of Dembé, a poor neighbourhood of N'Djamena, the capital of Chad.

Félicité and her husband arrived here 20 years ago. They are fortunate in having their own home: three huts accommodating the 10 members of the family. Otherwise, life is a struggle. Even as a public-sector worker, her pay does not cover their needs, particularly with the price increases of recent years. "With the oil money all that should have sorted itself out," she complains.

Like many of their compatriots, Félicité's family cannot understand what went wrong. Ten years after the oil started to flow, Chad is still close to the bottom of the human development index, ranked 184th out of 187 by the UN in 2012. It may have started with a big handicap, but little has changed for most people, fuelling widespread discontent towards President Idriss Déby, in power for the past 22 years.

In 10 years oil has earned the country $9.8bn. "On the international market oil prices have soared. We should not feel poverty so harshly," says Delphine Djiraibe, one of the heads of the Chadian Civil Society Network for Peace and Reconciliation (CSAPR) coalition of NGOs, established in 2002, that has repeatedly criticised the poor management of this windfall. "The resentment," she adds, "is particularly strong because oil revenue mainly benefits the elite."

Hopes were high when the Doba oilfields came on stream in 2003, prompting the launch of a new development scheme. The World Bank part-funded buildinga 1,100km pipeline from Chad to Cameroon. In exchange the authorities undertook to pay 10% of the income into a fund for future generations. Of the remainder, 80% was to be allocated to priority development sectors, 5% to the Doba area and no more than 15% to the national budget. But the agreement was short-lived, the cash being primarily used to buy arms to combat various rebel movements.

Peace was restored in 2009 and the focus of spending has shifted. Chad has signed up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which requires governments to publish details of mining revenues. "The problem now is governance," says Gilbert Maoundonodji of the Gramp/TC NGO, which monitors oil exports. He reckons 80% of revenue is being spent on infrastructure, particularly roads. "Massive, disproportionate investments," he adds, "often a legal way of capturing earnings."

The authorities say that substantial amounts have been spent on development. As well as roads, many schools and hospitals have been built, with various schemes to support farming, which occupies over three-quarters of the population. "It's true," says a humanitarian worker, "but there is an acute lack of planning and supervision."

Last year saw a massive public-sector strike from July to December. "The aim was to obtain a new pay scale, which the government promised in 2011 but never implemented," says trade union leader Michel Barka. Ultimately, an agreement was reached and the minimum wage was doubled.

Despite the lingering resentment there seems little likelihood of a Chadian spring. Unlike Tunisia or Egypt, the majority of the country's youth are still rural. "And who would take the responsibility of calling for demonstrations?" asks Abderamane Gossoumian, a CSAPR official. "What's more, we can make all the demands we like, but there are no politicians to carry them forward."

The recent military intervention in Mali, broadly supported by the Chadian population, has undoubtedly strengthened Déby's hand, but it leaves a bitter taste. "The operation was so dazzling," Djiraibe explains, "it makes us forget our difficulties at home."

• This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

• Chad
• Africa
• Oil
• Energy

Charlotte Bozonnet
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Plan to prevent felines from killing much-prized native birds causes consternation

Call it the Kiwi cat wars. In the island nation said to harbour more cat owners per capita than any other country, a furore has broken out over a crusade to eradicate man's second-best friend. The charge is being led by Gareth Morgan, a nationally renowned economist turned environmental activist, who has dubbed cats "natural born killers" that are menacing the native bird population and bringing some to the verge of extinction.

In late January, the philanthropist launched a website outlining his plan that would eventually lead to a cat-free country. Some scientists said he was, in fact, understating the threat posed by little Fluffy, while others argued that the ecosystem was far more complex than he was allowing for.

The mere suggestion of a feline-free nation is raising the dander of cat lovers of every stripe, with everyone from the prime minister to animal-welfare activists calling Morgan a kitty hater of the worst sort.

Writing on the opposition group Cats to Stay's Facebook page, which has more than 6,000 "likes", Jeremy Chang wrote of Morgan: "making the capital pest-free? Then he should stay away from Wellington."

New Zealand has an uneasy relationship with pests. Because of its geographic isolation, the country has become home to an exotic bird life that evolved in the absence of any native mammals, save three species of bats. Many birds, including the kiwi – the country's national symbol – became flightless.

Rats, opossums, short-tailed weasels – these have long been maligned as wholly unwelcome interlopers wreaking havoc on the native birdlife and landscape. The conservation department spent two years and more than $500,000 eradicating three short-tailed weasels off nearby Kapiti Island, for example.

But cats? New Zealanders love their little felines, with one study estimating they have the highest rate of cat ownership in the world.

"We have got a concerted effort on opossums, rats, mice, mustelids, but the one that stands out is cats. Everybody is too bloody PC and scared to take on cats. So I thought, I can handle that," said Morgan, one of Wellington's best-known figures.

Undeterred by the hate mail in his inbox – much of it from Americans, Morgan says – the businessman took his message to New Zealand's third-largest island recently in a campaign to make it pest-free, meaning cleared of feral cats, rats and other pests. He also wants the 400 residents to contain their free-roaming domestic cats.

New Zealand has already cleared more than 80 of its 220 offshore islands of invasive species. But Morgan's target, Stewart Island, is 15 times larger than any other that has been made pest-free, so the effort would be closely watched by conservationists around the world.

Morgan insists he is not anti-cat, just anti-wandering-cat. He wants domestic cats registered, as dogs are, and also neutered, kept indoors at all times or taken out on a leash, and not replaced when they die.

The furore has renewed a broader debate about the possibility – however far-fetched – of a New Zealand free of pests. Why not chuck out the whole lot? The idea gained steam in early 2012 after Paul Callaghan, a celebrated scientist who died later that year, said the concept could be New Zealand's equivalent of the Apollo space programme.

The notion of a pest-free New Zealand is not without huge challenges, including a massive price tag. A recent report by Landcare Research, a government research arm, said such an undertaking would exceed $20bn.

Still, New Zealand scientists talk dreamily about their 50-year vision of a country with no pest or invasive species. Cows and sheep could stay, but opossums, rats, weasels, ferrets and mice would have to go. And cats?

"Cats are the major sticking point to a pest-free New Zealand," said James Russell, an ecologist at the University of Auckland.

Cats may be cuddly companions, but they are predators, too: a study earlier this year by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service found that cats kill a median of 2.4 billion birds in the US each year, substantially more than previously thought.

It's hard to overstate just how much New Zealanders love birds, perhaps because theirs are unlike any others on the planet. Their dollar bills are festooned with birds. Radio New Zealand plays a bird call before the morning news. There is a multimillion-dollar bird sanctuary just minutes from downtown Wellington. (Morgan calls it "the most expensive cat food factory in the country.")

But there are competing views on the impact cats have in a complex ecosystem, and whether birds would in fact be worse off in the absence of cats, who prey on bird-killing rats. "The jury is out," said Andrea Byrom, an ecologist at Landcare Research.

Morgan helps fuel the debate by taking a few playful swipes at his critics. Take, for instance, his exchange with the prime minister, John Key, after Key said his cat, Moonbeam, would never hurt a bird.

Why not perform an autopsy on Moonbeam, Morgan recalled suggesting. "And I said, 'If there isn't any feathers, I'll buy you a new one.'"

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Washington Post

• New Zealand
• Animals
• Asia Pacific
• Cats
• Pets
• Birds
• Wildlife

Karla Adam
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Cockroaches, mosquitoes, bedbugs - some of the insects we find repellent form a vital part of species' interdependence

I detest household bugs. Abhor them. There isn't a word strong enough to describe how I feel about bugs in my home. That hatred provokes guilt, because I fancy myself an environmentalist. As such, I'm supposed to feel a kinship with all creatures.

We're connected in a circle of life, a colourful tapestry, a delicate web of interdependence. But I can't help it: my love of animals doesn't extend to cockroaches, bedbugs and their ilk. So I'm on a mission to prove that, in the vast family of 8.7m species on Earth, there are a few that we could do without.

Consider the cockroach, that most hated human pest. If we could render it extinct, would anyone – human, animal or plant – mourn the loss?

"Roaches in general get a bad rap from the 1% of cockroach species that infest our homes," says Coby Schal, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University who studies the little critters. "Most of the 5,000 known species of cockroaches, plus probably just as many that have not been described, have huge ecological importance."

Cockroaches can be found almost anywhere that supports life. The microbes in the bellies of forest roaches break down leaf litter and other plant materials that are indigestible to many mammals. They are pollinators in the tropics. Desert lizards feed on roaches. In the south-eastern US, Schal notes, cockroaches constitute more than 50% of the diet of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, a small, black-and-white bird with a red spot behind the eye of males. If these roaches disappeared, the birds and lizards that feed on them would suffer, and some might plummet dangerously close to extinction.

Fair enough. But what about those pesky roaches that run nightly riot in urban homes?

"I don't see any great ecological value to them," Schal says. "Most of the cockroaches in homes are German cockroaches, or sometimes American cockroaches. With a few exceptions, they live almost exclusively among humans."

(A terminology note: the German cockroach isn't from Germany, nor is the American cockroach a New World native. Carolus Linnaeus, the father of the binomial naming system, was given specimens from those areas and named them accordingly. Roaches probably emerged from east Africa or south-east Asia.)

Before deciding to magically render extinct German and American cockroaches, we might pause to marvel at their adaptation to human-dominated environments. They can live in broad temperature ranges and survive for weeks without food. They can eat almost anything, from spaghetti to steak, whereas other insects specialise. They have a waxy coating that prevents them from drying out in heated or air-conditioned environments.

The dangers of cockroaches are often overstated. Cockroaches do carry bacteria: faecal matter adheres to them, they ingest it during grooming and they defecate it, sometimes on to human food sources or food-related equipment. Nevertheless, Schal says, few studies have conclusively shown that roaches regularly transmit disease to humans. In fact, their main danger to people is the production of airborne allergenic proteins that are inhaled by people. Urban children sometimes suffer asthma or allergy attacks from roach exposure.

The verdict on cockroaches? It's unanimous among the entomologists I spoke with, at least for German cockroaches: we could safely eliminate them. They are so exquisitely adapted to life with humans that they fill no other ecological niche.

So what about bedbugs? If you've never faced a bedbug infestation, count yourself lucky. Their bites can cause enormous welts, and getting rid of the little critters is an ordeal, especially since some of the chemical agents most effective in combating them have been banned as environmental toxins. Is there anything nice to say about bedbugs?

"Some species of ants feed on bedbugs, as do a few spiders," says Michael Potter, an urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky. "We often find them caught in spider webs in dwellings. But is that the spider's primary source of food? Would the whole system come crashing down without them? I doubt it."

The frustrating thing is that we have already beaten back bedbugs once, at least in the US. When international travel increased in the 1990s, Potter notes, these insects returned to the US from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and parts of eastern Europe. We're partially culpable for their return. People used to prophylactically treat their mattresses and checked hotel beds when they travelled, but those habits faded. We also stopped developing new treatments to poison them, and bedbugs have become resistant to established methods.

Like the German cockroach, the common bedbug lives almost entirely among humans, and the entomologists I surveyed all agreed with Potter that, if they could, they would wave a magic wand and eliminate bedbugs. ("I'd wave it twice, just to be sure," says Micky Eubanks, an insect ecologist at Texas A&M University.)

When asked the more general question about which pests could safely be destroyed, Eubanks developed a theory: species living in their natural ranges at normal concentrations must be tolerated. Those living outside their ranges at excess abundance can at least be reduced if not discarded. (The German cockroach, for example, has no native range aside from our homes.) In between, there is a balancing act to be done.

He points to the Colorado potato beetle as an example. This insect is native to the New World and used to feed on a wild relative of the cultivated potato. When potato agriculture entered into the bug's natural range, the population exploded. It would be nice to reduce them, but take away too many and other creatures, such as parasitoid wasps that feast on them, would clearly suffer. You may not like wasps, but the loss of them would affect other predators, and a chain reaction would begin.

Mosquitoes are another tricky case. No creature is more dangerous to humans. Mosquito-borne illnesses kill more than a million people annually. But they are an important part of the ecosystem.

"Mosquitoes represent a significant biomass of food for other species," Potter says. "In places like Alaska, you get a huge emergence of adult mosquitoes when the temperature rises, and they are an important source of food for migratory birds and other critters."

Destroying mosquitoes might be risky, but I'm feeling much better about my willingness to get rid of German cockroaches and common bedbugs. It seems that some branches of the tree of life can be trimmed back a bit.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

• Insects
• Invasive species

Brian Palmer
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The colours and scents of the Dutch tulips transform both tourists and cynical locals alike

With standing room only, the bus sped down the freeway on a bright warm morning. Once we turned on to the Bollenstreek, long ribbons of intense blue, mauve and white stretched to the near horizon. Fields of yellow daffodils blared spring's final triumph over the particularly long winter. Every head on the bus turned and gazed. And then suddenly, quite spontaneously, everyone sighed together, "Aaahhhhhhhh." A breath song of collective awe.

We were headed to Keukenhof Gardens, famous for its variety of bulb flowers, especially tulips. I was feeling triumphant because I had two Dutch people in tow. My husband had finally run out of excuses and decided to appease his American wife. Along with us was a friend who, despite having lived near the gardens for the past 35 years, had never visited them.

It seemed that every time I mentioned this beautifully landscaped garden to the Dutch, they would smile uncomfortably as if to say, "Oh, that place full of tourist buses where you have to pay to see tulips. No thanks." No matter how hard I tried to convince them of the wonder and unique beauty of viewing seven million bulbs in bloom, the Dutch just looked at me like someone to be pitied.

Even our friend had justified her visit to the park to her children by saying there was "an American lady who wanted to go". But not 10 minutes after our arrival, she and my husband were overcome with the fragrance of hyacinths, the morning light flickering through cherry blossoms, the sound of water flowing over carefully placed stones, and the old oaks whose gnarled trunks resembled elephant feet.

People of all nations and faiths were visibly touched by the richness around them. Languages softly floated and whirled around us blending with the scent of blossoms. Cameras clicked. A French couple snapped photos of their two toddlers sitting in a tulip field. Young women dressed in hijabs stood for their photos next to potted black tulips aptly named Queen of the Night. Japanese women, afraid of tanning, hid under umbrellas held by gloved hands. A fleet of elderly in wheelchairs posed by the fountain, its sound rushing, swishing, gurgling beyond us.

"If only the world could just plant tulips," I thought. Even as thousands of visitors poured in throughout the day, a stillness remained. The natural beauty of scent, colour, sound and sunlight seemed to quiet the restless minds and chatter of people. In some ways, it felt like paradise, as we all mingled past flowers that we knew, like ourselves, were fleeting in time, transitory in nature.

• Every week Guardian Weekly publishes a Letter from one of its readers from around the world. We welcome submissions – they should focus on giving a clear sense of a place and its people. Please send them to weekly.letter.from@guardian.co.uk

• Netherlands
• Europe
• Wild flowers
• Gardens

Catherine Ann Lombard
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The climate sceptic's interpretation of my study as final endorsement of his position means we can move on

It isn't often, as a climate scientist, that you find your research being enthusiastically endorsed by climate sceptic Matt Ridley in the Times. We published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday giving a new best estimate of 1.3C for the warming expected due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time when carbon dioxide levels reach double what they were before the industrial revolution (known as Transient Climate Response, or TCR).

Ridley is excited about this, because he feels it means that until his teenage children reach retirement age, they won't have to worry about global warming. And he is worried that government policies are misguided because they place their faith in climate models, like one of the Met Office models that puts the warming instead at 2.5C, almost twice our estimate.

But no one places their faith in any single climate model, and no one has done so for 20 years. Climate scienitsts are all well aware the Met's model (HadGEM2) is at the top end of the current range. The Met Office's advice to government is based on the range of results from current climate models, not just their own.

The relevant comparison is not with the 2.5C response of one model, but with the average of climate models used by the UN's climate science panel in its upcoming major report, which is 1.8C. Now 1.3C is 30% less than 1.8C, but this is hardly a game changer: at face value, our new findings mean that the changes we had previously expected between now and 2050 might take until 2065 to materialise instead. Then again, they might not: 1.8C is within our range of uncertainty; and natural variability will affect what happens in the 2050s anyway.

Despite this, our study seems to be being enthusiastically cited by Ridley and climate sceptics the world over as final endorsement of their position. If this means their position is that the most likely response is 30% lower than the average of our current models, then perhaps the debate on global temperature is indeed over: 30% is well within the range of uncertainty anyway. But that doesn't mean all debate about climate is over.

Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability? Try explaining to a casino bouncer that it doesn't matter you are using loaded dice because a triple-six is within historic variability – but that is a different story.

Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them; or if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?); or if, like Bjorn Lomborg, you discount future damages to give very little weight to anything that happens after 2065; or if you firmly believe that the "second coming" will occur before 2065 anyway – then there probably isn't much point in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are perfectly coherent ethical positions: they don't happen to be positions that I subscribe to, but if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it.

It is almost inevitable that a debate as acrimonious as this could only end with a firm declaration of victory on all sides. This appears to be what we are seeing. If this means we can move on from a sterile debate about the global response to much more interesting questions about regional impacts, the rights of different generations, and, most interesting of all, what to do about it, that's great. Ridley, welcome to the real climate debate.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change

Myles Allen
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When drivers say cyclists don't belong on the roads because they 'don't pay tax', it is a dangerous, dehumanising attitude

It's safe to assume that most people in the event of hitting a cyclist while driving, who realised what they had done, would stop, call the police, and stay on the scene. Not so for one young woman, who appears to have hit a cyclist, carried on driving, and then most bizarrely taken to Twitter to boast of the incident.

@emmaway20 Emma Way
Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier – I have right of way he doesn't even pay road tax! #bloodycyclists

Norwich Police responded quickly, asking Emma to get in touch with them as soon as possible, and report it, rather than broadcast it to the world.

@emmaway20 we have had tweets ref an RTC with a bike. We suggest you report it at a police station ASAP if not done already & then dm us

— Norwich Police (@NorwichPoliceUK) May 19, 2013

Way has since deleted her Twitter account, after cyclists on Twitter roundly turned on her, especially once a cyclist came forward who had been hit by a car that didn't stop shortly before Way's missive. Toby Hockley, who'd been riding the Boudicca Sportive with the Iceni Velo club, came forward after seeing the fallout on Twitter. Both parties are now in contact with the police, Norfolk constabulary have confirmed.

What her statement says about hierarchy on our roads is just as interesting as watching social media close the net around someone claiming to have injured a cyclist. For starters there's the tiresome fact that, as every cyclist knows, road tax doesn't exist – you pay vehicle excise duty for your car, and road maintenance is funded from centralised taxes. Yet, the canard of "road tax" as an annual toll for using roads is rolled out time and again by motorists annoyed at the mere presence of bikes on the road. The fact that cyclists seemingly "don't pay" to use roads, then overtake motorists in traffic jams rankles, is burned deep in the minds of our more irrational drivers.

This internalised hierarchy on the roads is also evident as a pedestrian – it's not uncommon to be crossing a road when the lights have turned amber and have cars race off narrowly avoiding you, or for cars to ignore the fact you've stepped onto a zebra crossing for the sake of shaving a few seconds off their journey. But cyclists seem to bear the brunt of this – few cyclists don't experience regular outbursts of road rage, or dangerous driving from motorists who've clearly clocked them but are simply unhappy they're allowed on the road at all.

I've been told to "pay road tax" more times than I can remember, though sadly explaining the intricacies of road taxation – deftly explained by the excellent site I Pay Road Tax – takes longer than the few seconds you get on the road. And when this entitlement dehumanises cyclists to the extent someone is happy to excuse hitting a cyclist by explaining they don't believe they should be on the road at all, it becomes more than an annoyance – it's an active danger.

• Cycling
• Fitness
• Road safety
• Crime

Dawn Foster
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Gerry Judah, born in Kolkata, returned to India after more than 50 years to see how people are tackling the effects of global warming

Even with 100 years of media attention, not everything written about the Chelsea flower show has been so blooming obvious

Now in its hundredth year, the Chelsea Flower Show clings on, almost ivy-like, to its past. Just as it is wedded to convention, so too is the language used by the press to describe the annual 'horticultural extravaganza'. Like the rest of Fleet Street, the Guardian and Observer have fallen into this trap - just carry out a simple archive search and you will unearth trusty descriptions of the event being a 'blaze' or 'riot' of colour, or an 'oasis of beauty'. The winner of the gold medal has to be the Observer for its 1935 headline describing the show as a Pageant of Loveliness.

This year's event, with its glistening rock pools and velvet smooth lawns, will feature garden gnomes, which had been banned by organisers for being crude and inelegant. Ask any of the 165,000 visitors that are expected to attend this year, and they will tell you about the Royal Horticultural Society's very high standards and rules that exhibitors must abide by.

In the 1950s one excited designer is said to have created a formal garden around a swimming pool, adding a pair of dazzling blonde models in swimsuits as a finishing touch. Mortified by what they had seen, the organisers initially struggled to find a suitable reason to ban the work. Eventual they invoked the rule which forbids 'livestock' of any kind.

A fondness for rules may have gained the Royal Horticultural Society a grouchy reputation but their Great Spring Show, to give it its original name, did change with the times. When the show returned after the First World War, much emphasis was given to the utilitarian use of land to grow cheap food, seen as more important in post-war Britain than decorative gardening and the fashion for 'lordy orchid houses kept up by wealthy men.'

By the 1930s, the reputation of the flower show had grown to the point that practically every parson and his wife from the country queued with city folk to squeeze into the annual show. Despite the discomfort, many were educated on how to cultivate roses and rhododendrons, or were dazzled by the spectacle of an exotic Japanese garden. The nation's obsession with all things horticultural extended to the Royal Family, who were spared the crush by being shown round before the public.

In the 1950s the flower show seemed to turn its back on massed ranks of azaleas and begonias, as green-leaved indoor plants offered a visual relief from the 'blaze of colour' traditionally associated with Chelsea. The Guardian's visit in 1957 also noted that the 'implement section' - garden tools, as we now call them - had long queues, with visitors clutching cheque books so they could purchase the latest gardening hardware.

It was this drift towards commercialisation that riled the famed naturalist David Bellamy, who reportedly refused to attend the event in 1999.

If Bellamy's barbed comments about the show weren't damaging enough, a scathing attack on the event by Monty Don, writing in the Observer in 2001, must have made the organisers feel like someone was aiming a sharp pitch fork at them. Maybe Don was only saying what many had always thought about the Chelsea Flower Show - that it was 'driven by money and snobbery' - but his comments could not have made comfortable reading for the organisers.

• Chelsea flower show
• Gardens
• London

Jason Rodrigues
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What do emptier waters look like? This web aquarium shows declining fish populations over the past 100 years - and it uses more than 200 datasets to do it

Mona Chalabi

Vaccine will prevent a disease that causes severe birth defects and miscarriages in livestock

A new vaccine is being made available to prevent a disease which causes severe birth defects and miscarriages in livestock, it was announced today.

Schmallenberg virus, which emerged in the Netherlands and Germany in 2011 and has been seen in cattle and sheep in the UK since early 2012, has been identified on more than 1,700 farms across the country.

Adult animals infected during pregnancies in the autumn by virus-carrying midges, thought to have blown across the Channel, have given birth to deformed or stillborn lambs and calves.

UK farmers are the first in the European Union to have access to a vaccine against Schmallenberg, which will be available for vaccinating livestock this summer before most animals become pregnant again.

The Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) has licensed veterinary pharmaceutical company MSD Animal Health to provide the "Bovolis SBV" vaccine.

VMD chief executive, Pete Borriello, said: "This is the culmination of intensive activity on the part of MSD Animal Health and the VMD to make a safe and effective vaccine available to tackle Schmallenberg.

"Without in any way compromising the scientific rigour of our assessment process, we accelerated our assessment so that a vaccine will be available this summer."

This means it will be possible to vaccinate sheep and cattle before most of them become pregnant. This is important as it is during pregnancy when exposure to the virus can cause damage to the foetus."

The government's deputy chief veterinary officer, Alick Simmons, said: "The vaccine will give extra assurance against this disease on top of the natural immunity we expect sheep and cattle to develop after initial exposure."

• Farming
• Agriculture
• Animals

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While biofuels have facilitated slow but positive change for farmers in Brazil, other countries have been less successful

Biofuels have long been hailed as one of the potential answers to climate change. Their environmental credentials are controversial, but a handful of countries are now looking at them from another angle entirely: they want to use biofuels to try to reduce poverty among rural smallholder farmers.

Such efforts are in full force in Brazil, a country that is home to both a sizeable biofuels industry and about 4.1m small-scale family farms. But while some of the country's biofuels policies have fallen short, others have proved a boon to the rural poor. Smallholder farmers have seen their incomes rise thanks to the introduction of more progressive standards and new rules on contract negotiations.

"The numbers show that the farmers in Brazil … have been earning far more than they were before – not only in absolute quantities, but also as a percentage of the whole value of the [biofuels production] chain," says Mairon Bastos Lima, a PhD researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the author of a recent briefing paper (pdf) that looked at the social impacts of biofuels polices in Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Bastos Lima describes the Brazilian biofuels policies as "the best example" he has seen.

In most cases, he says, smallholder farmers who cultivate biofuels are included only in the lowest level of the production chain. That means that most of the wealth from production accrues to the refiners, or to the company that is managing the process, not to the farmers themselves. But in Brazil this has started to change, albeit slowly.

This success, Bastos Lima says, is largely due to the fact that Petrobras, Brazil's state-run energy giant, created its own biofuels division in 2008. The new state company took over from the private firms that had been running the government's biofuels production contracts with smallholder farmers in north-eastern Brazil.

When Petrobras came on the scene, the company introduced a number of changes. It required that farmers devote no more than 20% of their arable land to growing the precursors to biofuels; the rest of their farms had to be reserved for edible crops. This "mixed food and feed-stock" policy helps to guarantee that the farmers maintain a steady food supply, regardless of what happens in the biofuels market.

Petrobras also introduced a policy of including social movements in all of its contract negotiations with smallholder farmers. Under the current policy, any contractual agreement with farmers is not valid until a rural social movement has signed off on it.

"This balances the bargaining power," says Bastos Lima, "because suddenly you cannot put pressure on one individual household" to accept the terms of an agreement. The impact of the change is already being felt.

"Social movements had to fight really hard with Petrobras to actually stand their ground and say, 'no, we want to climb up at least one step in the value chain … and have more of an income'," says Bastos Lima.

The number of households involved in Brazil's smallholder biofuels production programme quadrupled between 2008 and 2010; more than 100,000 families are now involved. In 2010, the Brazilian government bought roughly $635m (£413m) worth of biofuels feedstock from its smallholder farmers, a fivefold increase from two years earlier.

But while Brazil has had some success with its efforts to include smallholder farmers in the biofuels production chain, things have not always gone so well in other places, warns Bastos Lima.

"The case of India has been particularly disastrous," he says, noting that the Indian government placed a huge bet on a plant called jatropha, which was widely hailed as the next big breakthrough in biofuels back in 2007 and 2008. Inspired by promising scientific studies, the government called for the cultivation of jatropha on more than 11m hectares (27m acres) of land. But then reality set in: the crop's yields were disappointing, and many Indian farmers were left with reduced incomes, coupled with a smaller supply of food to give their own families.

Such experiences demonstrate why more work needs to be done to understand the social consequences of biofuels production, says Chris Charles, a project manager in the Geneva office of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

"There's a real lack of research – quantitative and qualitative research – assessing … the extent of the negative or positive impacts on smallholder farmers," says Charles. "Campaigning groups publish very emotional pieces showing small farmers in Asia, for example, being displaced from their land by large monoculture biofuel operations. [But] it's hard to know how academic or rigorous that analysis is."

• This article was corrected on 21 May 2013. The Institute for Environmental Studies is at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, not the University of Amsterdam

• Environmental sustainability
• Biofuels
• Farming
• Brazil
• Americas

Paige McClanahan
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The company, which grows 25% of Scottish farmed salmon, will join Aquaculture Stewardship council's strict new scheme

One of the world's largest fish farm companies, Marine Harvest, has voluntarily agreed to much tougher limits on its pesticides use and seal killing by joining a strict new environment scheme.

Marine Harvest will join the Aquaculture Stewardship council, a new accreditation scheme championed by WWF, after coming under repeated attack for heavy use of toxic chemicals, seal-killing and major outbreaks of sea lice and salmon diseases.

The Norwegian-owned company, which grows 25% of all Scotland's farmed salmon, has promised to put all its UK fish farms through ASC accreditation by the end of this decade in what supporters of the scheme believes could transform the environmental sustainability of salmon farming.

It will force the firm to put a strict cap on escapes of farmed salmon – a problem with critics believe threatens the survival of wild salmon stocks – and cut chemical treatments. Under the scheme, the killing of seals as a precautionary measure to protect salmon will be drastically reduced but not entirely stopped. It would also require the company to only use fishfeed derived from Marine Stewardship Council-accredited wild fish stocks or other, non-wild sources of protein.

The move follows increasing criticism by environment and conservation campaigners about the Freedom Foods scheme operated by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which only applies the minimum legal standards on environmental protection and has been widely criticised for failing to penalise fish farms that breach standards.

Under the ASC scheme, said Lang Banks, director WWF Scotland, the company's farms would lose it accreditation if it fails to meet standards.

Guy Linley-Adams, of the Salmon & Trout Association, which has been highly critical of the fish farming industry, said: "This isn't the end of the story. Marine Harvest still have fish-farms in the wrong places, as do all fish-farmers. They are too near to wild salmonid rivers threatening wild fish conservation and those farms need to be relocated."

• Fishing
• Food
• Wildlife
• Conservation
• Animals
• Marine life
• Scotland

Severin Carrell
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Here is a brand new mold and the first mold I tried and abused.  That pour I did in my makeshift brick oven took over an hour to finally melt the silver. I have done about 15 more pours with mold #1 and it is just about finished.   All that pressure from the torch really eats away the graphite.  I have added a "pressure shield" to the mix and with a 5 minute melt time in the mini micro, I'm getting much less mold degradation.  I think I can get at least 30 ingots out of a mold now.  Did 14 in total today.  I was reluctant to pursue this venture using propane when I discovered the big solar lens couldn't do the job until I figured out that one 20 lb load of gas is way more than enough to do 100 ingots  The Ben'n'Bud Feed Fundraiser will officially start in about 2 weeks.   88,101,65,0,C,.25  

Melissa Block talks to Jon Hamilton about the science of tornadoes.

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Tornado strength is currently measured on what is called the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which gives the tornado a rating from 0 to 5 based on estimated wind speeds and the severity of the damage.

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Coombs Dale, Derbyshire: The land is scarred and nicked, like the face of a veteran fighter, but the blackthorn is smothered in blossom

The high limestone country north of Longstone Edge has its own strange energy, a consequence perhaps of the quarrying there, both ancient and modern. The land is scarred and nicked, like the face of a veteran fighter, a blue-collar countryside.

It's also rich with tales of horror, now recruited for the purposes of tourism. The notorious highwayman Black Harry, hanged at nearby Wardlow Mires, has lent his name to a network of bridleways for horse riders to explore.

Running across this landscape is the drawn bow of Coombs Dale, with its own legacy of mine workings but now a refuge for nature in the green mosaic of white-walled pasture with, in Ted Hughes' phrase, its "reluctant nibbled grass".

One moment I'm on the main road through Stoney Middleton Dale, rattling with quarry traffic, the next in an almost secret world, at the bottom of a steep-sided valley, and bathed in spring sunshine.

Coombs Dale is known for its rarities: dark green fritillaries that congregate near Sallet Hole Mine, the woolly-headed thistle, maiden pink and leadwort. The southern slopes are covered in cowslips.

Alongside the path are hazel and willows thick with catkins. But the real pleasure is the blossom smothering the blackthorn. Last month I cycled up this lane under grey skies and barely noticed them. Now I'm shrouded in their scent.

It's not just the raw appeal of the dale threaded with creamy white flowers. Blackthorn has an almost sculptural appeal, the thick thorns spreading horizontally, which adds a spiky depth to the overall effect.

Most wood is useful, but blackthorn has an intimate, tactile quality to its utility: wands, walking sticks, shillelaghs and, in the hands of Black Rod, parliamentary doorknockers.

By the time I emerge into the upper dale, the sky has darkened and a brief hailstorm stings my face while the lambs curl up for warmth.

• Wild flowers
• Spring
• Derbyshire
• Rural affairs
• Peak District
• United Kingdom
• England
• Mining
• Plants

Ed Douglas
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