Climate change is causing a radical reshuffle of the UK’s birds, with some species disappearing while new migrants settle in, a report finds. Aspects of birds’ life histories, including the timing of egg laying and migration, are also being significantly altered as the climate warms, the analysis shows. Some birds are now appearing more than 20 days earlier than they did in the 1960s, BBC Newsreports. The swallow, for instance, is arriving 15 days earlier than 50 years ago. ”We need to take that almost as a warning sign,” Dr Daniel Hayhow, lead author of the report, told BBC News. ”The report is aiming to show to people that these changes are happening and there is potential for such changes in timing to cause a mismatch between the time when the chicks need to be fed and the food that’s available for them, meaning they may be less successful in their breeding.” The results come from The State of the UK’s Birds report for 2017, which was released today by the RSPB, British Trust for Ornithology and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust. The Times also has the story.

Ireland must wake up to its duty to do more to tackle climate change, an EU official has said, according to a report in the Irish edition of The Times. The European commissioner for agriculture Phil Hogan said that Ireland must “wake up” to its international obligations at a conference on sustainable food production in Dublin yesterday. The former Irish environment minister said that he welcomed recognition that increased food production cannot be considered in isolation from its environmental impact, “but there is a gulf between this welcome rhetoric and the operational reality”. Elsewhere in the Irish edition of the Times, it was reported that there have been new calls for Ireland to to ban the use of coal and peat as part of their efforts to tackle climate change. The independent Climate Change Advisory Council made the recommendations as part of its annual report.

The cost of petrol and diesel was up by 2p a litre nationwide last month, meaning the average price of fuel reached its most expensive level in three years, a report finds. Figures released by The RAC, an automotive services company in the UK, show that the price of a litre of unleaded fuel rose from 118.43p to 120.78p, and diesel from 120.96p to 123.18p, during the course of the month. This was largely due to the global price of oil being above the $60 per barrel mark during the whole of November, the group said.

The world’s oceans are more at threat today than at any other time in history, Sir David Attenborough is to say. Attenborough will issue the warning in the final episode of the Blue Planet 2 series, which will reveal the damage to seas around the globe as a result of human activity, including via climate change, plastic pollution and overfishing. “For years we thought the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have an effect upon them. But now we know that was wrong,” Attenborough will say. “It is now clear our actions are having a significant impact on the world’s oceans. [They] are under threat now as never before in human history. Many people believe the oceans have reached a crisis point.”

The Conservatives must go beyond gimmicks to clean up their image surrounding climate change, according to an editorial in The Guardian. “Supporting business and keeping the planet safe do not have to be mutually exclusive goals, but there are trade-offs that many Conservatives find uncomfortable,” the editorial reads. “It does not help that the right wing of the party wears an ideological streak of climate-change denial.” It adds that Michael Gove’s eco-friendly interventions, including backing a ban on pesticides that harm bees, cannot “obscure a controversial record of voting against measures to halt global warming”. Elsewhere in the Guardian, Chandran Nair, author of Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet, argues that Asia may be the superpower that is forced to bear the brunt of fixing climate change. “The west isn’t going to sort this out. Its democracies face huge difficulties when confronted by the need for unpopular decisions that dramatically shift lifestyles and mean people must give up privileges such as car and air travel that they have taken for granted,” he says. “When it comes to the future of the planet, decisions in Beijing, New Delhi, Jakarta and Lagos will be more important than those taken in Washington or Brussels.”

Local government, civil society and the private sector are responding to the Paris climate deal despite president Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement, writes Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and one of the architects of the global pact, in an article for New York Times “Turning Points” magazine. “As local governments see how climate change is linked to citizens’ well-being, they are taking concrete actions such as setting milestones for air quality, banning diesel cars or combustion engines, and implementing renewable energy systems,” Tubiana notes, while the private sector “can see this is the future and companies are investing accordingly”. She adds: “Mr. Trump’s claim that this move will help the American economy does not hold up…We are also in a time when extreme events are becoming more frequent and more costly.” She concludes: “The global movement that was founded upon the statements in the Paris agreement is about people, citizens’ concerns, economic expectations and technological development. It is not a technocratic legal document, nor about abandoning national sovereignty. We are working toward a shared vision of a common future, with the goal of safeguarding the planet for all.” [The European Climate Foundation funds Carbon Brief.]

Being exposed to high temperatures early in life could hinder a child way into their adult life, new research suggests. A study of data from 12 million people living in the US finds that for each day that an unborn baby is exposed to temperatures above 32C, their earnings at the age of 30 are expected to fall by 0.1%. “Temperature sensitivity is evident in multiple periods of early development, ranging from the first trimester of gestation to age 6–12 mo,” the researchers say. “We observe that household air-conditioning adoption, which increased dramatically over the time period studied, mitigates nearly all of the estimated temperature sensitivity.”