Breaking Waves: Ocean News

I first noticed it a couple of weeks ago on the streets of Cardiff – and it felt alarmingly wrong When the wind is warm, you know something is up. Naturally, I have been well aware of the awful reality of the climate crisis, but it has taken the warmth of the wind to really panic me. Not the endless 30C+ days, the desiccated garden, the tap slowing to a drip. No, it is the warm wind blowing on me. I can just about manage in punishing heat, even though it is particularly suffocating when the air is still. But I thought I had a tacit agreement with the British climate that at least when there was a breeze it would cool me down a bit. When a breeze warms me up, here in the UK anyway, it feels nothing less than un-British, and I wonder if we really are getting into the end of days. I first noticed it a couple of weeks ago on the streets of Cardiff. I turned a corner on St Mary’s Street and there it was, a strong gust of properly warm wind, right in my face and down into my lungs. Reeling, gasping a little, I looked around for the idling bus that had surely generated this unpleasant blast of air. But this wind hadn’t emanated from a bus’s rear, for there was no bus in sight. It was the weather and it felt alarmingly wrong. Continue reading...

NT minister for trade and business Robyn Cahill makes scientifically inaccurate claims while pushing to make territory ‘datacentre capital of the globe’ Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A Northern Territory minister has been criticised for scientifically inaccurate claims that groundwater in the Northern Territory needs to be used to prevent the Earth’s magnetic poles from flipping. The NT minister for trade and business, Robyn Cahill, made the claim while speaking in Darwin last week about the government’s push to make the territory “the datacentre capital of the globe”. Continue reading...

Industrial poultry farming is killing our rivers. But rather than stop it, the government has been facilitating it. Will Andy Burnham end this ecocide? There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the environment secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one who … no, they went, didn’t they? That other one …” It’s been like this for seven years. Why? Because throughout this period, we’ve not had environment secretaries. We’ve had portals through which corporate lobbyists may pass. The last incumbent to represent the wider public interest (and I can scarcely bring myself to type these words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he’s widely remembered with loathing and disgust. Out of office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general astonishment, he placed the public good above special interests. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

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