Breaking Waves: Ocean News

The corporate-financed backlash to calls for global climate progress has been greatly empowered by the Trump administration. It’s never been more critical to challenge the misinformation that could turn a crisis into a catastrophe Support the Guardian’s independent, fact-based journalism today A little over a decade ago I published a book, This Changes Everything, which explored the reality of the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet. For a few years after the book came out, it seemed like we might just win a breakthrough. A cascade of large and militant mobilisations pressed the case for keeping warming below 1.5C as global calls for a green new deal grew louder and louder. Countries across the world announced long-term plans to reduce emissions and to hit net-zero targets; so did some of the largest corporations on the planet. And then … well, we all know what happened. A corporate-financed backlash on all fronts. In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, his administration took more than 140 actions to roll back environmental rules and push for greater use of fossil fuels. He signed executive orders to ease restrictions on their extraction and export, filled his cabinet with oil industry supporters, gutted federal agencies on the forefront of the climate crisis, and cancelled life-saving environmental justice projects. Join George Monbiot and special guests on 16 September for a special climate assembly to discuss the growing and dramatic political and corporate threats to the planet. Book tickets – in person or livestream Continue reading...

Devastating twister packs gusts of up to 168mph, injuring 89 people and leaving trail of destruction Japan has experienced the strongest tornado in its recorded history after a devastating twister tore through Shizuoka prefecture. Classified as a JEF3, level 3 out of 5 on Japan’s tornado intensity scale, the tornado packed wind gusts of up to 168mph last Friday, injuring 89 people and leaving a trail of destruction. The hardest hit areas included Makinohara and Yoshida, where vehicles were overturned and more than 1,200 structures were damaged. Since records began in 1961, Japan has experienced 13 level 3 tornadoes, but none have reached level 4. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Leachate is tankered to treatment works where it mixes with sewage and industrial effluent More than 750,000 tonnes of liquid from landfills are mixed with sewage at water treatment works and spread on farmland across England each year, it can be revealed. Generated by hundreds of landfills across the country, leachate – the liquid that drains through landfill waste carrying a cocktail of chemicals – is regularly tankered to sewage treatment works, where it mixes with domestic sewage and industrial effluent to create sludge, also described as “biosolids”. Continue reading...

DNA analysis of endemic specimens in museums finds 79% of ant populations in Pacific archipelago are shrinking Island-dwelling insects have not been spared the ravages of humanity that have pushed so many of their invertebrate kin into freefall around the world, new research on Fijian ant populations has found. Hundreds of thousands of insect species have been lost over the past 150 years and it is believed the world is now losing between 1% and 2.5% a year of its remaining insect biomass – a decline so steep that many entomologists say we are living through an “insect apocalypse”. Yet long-term data for individual insect populations is sparse and patchy. Continue reading...