Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Events in California reveal how political obstruction is deepening a climate crisis that needs urgent action to prevent it becoming an irreversible disaster The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have killed at least 10 people, displaced 180,000 and scorched about 40 square miles – an inferno driven by fierce winds and severe drought in what should be California’s wet season. It is a sobering reminder that the climate crisis is driving wildfires to become more frequent, intense and destructive – leaving ruined lives, homes and livelihoods in their wake. The US president Joe Biden responded by mobilising federal aid. By contrast the president-elect, Donald Trump, a convicted felon who was criminally sentenced on Friday, used the disaster to spread disinformation and stoke political division. The climate crisis knows no national borders. Deadly floods in Spain, Hawaii’s fires and east Africa’s devastating drought show nowhere is safe from its effects. Countries must work toward the global common interest and beyond their narrow national interests. The scale of the climate emergency is such that there is a case to view all crises through a green lens. Instead Mr Trump’s denialism works to foment distrust about the science. He’s not just aiming to delay the onset of truth. He wants to demolish it. It’s a familiar playbook: the fossil fuel industry knows the reality of the climate emergency but chooses profit over responsibility, effectively deceiving the public while the planet burns. Continue reading...

Claims that power plants are gaming the system to charge huge sums to switch on in the UK’s cold weather No 10 insists UK has sufficient energy supply A rise in electricity costs this week has raised fears that officials operating Great Britain’s power market could be held to “ransom” by owners of gas power plants during cold, windless days in order to keep the lights on. Here, we look why costs have increased sharply, the trading rules for plants and the implications for Labour’s clean power ambitions. Continue reading...

To solve the climate crisis, power must flow away from the billionaire class When I feel uncertain, I find it’s helpful to write down things I know to be true. Fossil fuels are causing irreversible planetary overheating. Overheating threatens essentially all life on Earth. Oil and gas executives knew this but they chose to systematically lie and block a climate transition. They continue to make this choice. I choose to focus my energy on the climate crisis because a habitable planet is a prerequisite for everything worth fighting for, and because the prospect of losing a planet feels horrific and sad to me in a primal way that I can’t express with words. I’m also simply in love with the Earth. But planetary overheating is really just the most geophysical symptom of extractive colonial capitalism – “billionairism” – a system designed to pump wealth from the poor to the rich, creating billionaires, the healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, genocide, hierarchies like racism and patriarchy, and a great deal of suffering. Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution Continue reading...

At least 45 whales were entangled by fishing ropes and line on the east coast in 2024. 'There’s a lot of times when we’ll get out to an entanglement where we just think, this animal should just probably be put to sleep,' says Sea World’s head of marine sciences, Wayne Phillips. The constant drag of rope and floats slowly causes a whale to succumb to exhaustion. 'It’s probably the worst way of dying for any marine … animal,' marine scientist Olaf Meynecke, says. 'It takes weeks to several months until they actually die' Continue reading...