A decision by the president of the United States of America (US), Donald Trump, to withdraw his country from the Paris Accord on climate change weakens US global leadership.
Responses from the leaders of the G7 countries were negative. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was highly critical of Trump’s decision, calling it “extremely regrettable and that is putting it mildly.”
 

In July this year, the Swedish automobile manufacturer, Volvo, announced it will cease putting internal combustion engines in its cars in 2019 and will only make fully electric or hybrid models.
 
This is the boldest commitment by any automotive company so far in the development of electric or hybrid cars. But other manufacturers are also moving in that direction and this year, General Motors launched the Chevrolet Bolt, which is a battery powered car.
 

July 2016 was the hottest month since records began in 1880. Jos Lelieveld, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute, has warned that large areas of the planet could become so hot that they would be virtually uninhabitable for humans.

This would trigger an exodus of hundreds of millions of refugees. Lelieveld maintains, “The July temperatures must underline the urgency of the crisis.”

I finally kicked smoking on 1 January 1972. It was a huge struggle, as nicotine is as addictive as heroin, but it was my New Year resolution and I was able to stick with it. 

I made my first visit to Kew Gardens in London in the early 1980s. It is a beautiful and highly scientific place and in May this year, it produced an extraordinarily important report on The State of the World’s Plants.

The good news is that the staff now believe that there are 390,000 species of plants on earth. The director of science at Kew Gardens, Kathy Willis, spoke to Damian Carrington of The Guardian about the importance of plants for humans.

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago in 1866, Father Gregory Mendel published an article entitled, Experiments with Plant Hybrids, in a scientific journal in the city of Brno (Brünn in German), which today is in the Czech Republic.

He sent copies of his research to a number of prominent naturalist scholars across Europe, including Charles Darwin. Darwin did not read Mendel’s paper; if he had it would have helped him understand how his own theory of evolution worked.

The El Niño is causing damage to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s northern east coast in a manner that was predicted by Pope Francis in his encyclical, Praise Be: On care for our common home (Laudato Si’).