As the summit goes into its second week, complex issues with anxiety growing over conference outcomes
There was a brief flurry of noise in the “where on Earth will Cop31 be held” guessing game on the weekend.
For those who have not been paying attention: Australia and Turkey have rival bids to host next year’s Cop. They have for years. Australia’s bid is to co-host a “Pacific Cop” with Pacific island nations.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
Cop30: calls for new urgency to talks as studies show global warming may reach 2.5C – latest updates
11/17/2025 - 07:49
11/17/2025 - 05:00
The search for a gingko-toothed beaked whale had taken five years, when a thieving albatross nearly ruined it all
It was an early morning in June 2024 and along the coast of Baja California in Mexico, scientists on the Pacific Storm research vessel were finishing their coffee and preparing for a long day searching for some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. Suddenly a call came from the bridge: “Whales! Starboard side!”
For the next few hours, what looked like a couple of juvenile beaked whales kept surfacing and disappearing until finally Robert Pitman, a now-retired researcher at Oregon State University, fired a small arrow from a modified crossbow at the back of one of them.
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11/17/2025 - 03:47
Castle Water says restructuring plans do not go far enough and extra funds will help resolve pollution crisis
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A bidder for Thames Water has said it would inject £1bn more into the struggling utility company than rival proposals if it gained control.
John Reynolds, the chief executive of the independent water retailer Castle Water, said the current plans under discussion with creditors to rebuild Thames Water’s finances does not go far enough and does not properly address its environmental crisis.
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11/17/2025 - 03:00
A new study suggests heatwaves will not revert back towards preindustrial conditions for at least 1,000 years after emissions target reached
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Heatwaves will become hotter, longer and more frequent the later net zero emissions is reached globally, new research suggests.
Scientists at the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather and Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, simulated how heatwaves would respond over the next 1,000 years, examining the differences for each five-year delay in reaching net zero between 2030 and 2060.
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11/17/2025 - 00:25
Wait … I’m hearing you have worked it out you’re just not doing it
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11/17/2025 - 00:00
Analysis shows small hike in populations of insect-eating species after 2018 ruling, but full recovery may take decades
Insect-eating bird populations in France appear to be making a tentative recovery after a ban on bee-harming pesticides, according to the first study to examine how wildlife is returning in Europe.
Neonicotinoids are the world’s most common class of insecticides, widely used in agriculture and for flea control in pets. By 2022, four years after the European Union banned neonicotinoid use in fields, researchers observed that France’s population of insect-eating birds had increased by 2%-3%. These included blackbirds, blackcaps and chaffinches, which feed on insects as adults and as chicks.
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11/16/2025 - 14:14
Marina Silva says contentious plan would be ‘ethical answer’ to climate crisis but does not commit Brazil to it
Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has urged all countries to have the courage to address the need for a fossil fuel phaseout, calling the drawing up of a roadmap for it an “ethical” response to the climate crisis.
She emphasised, however, that the process would be voluntary for those governments that wished to participate, and “self-determined”.
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11/16/2025 - 14:00
Ending use of coal, oil and gas is essential in tackling climate crisis – but even talking about it is controversial
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11/16/2025 - 09:00
Champions of exceptionalism say humans hold a unique moral status. Yet there’s only one species recklessly destroying the planet it needs to survive
At first light in Massachusetts bay, a North Atlantic right whale threads the shallows with her calf tucked into her slipstream. She surfaces, and the V-shaped breath – two brief feathers of vapor – vanishes in the cold air.
The calf is roughly three months old, about the length of a small truck, still learning the rhythm: rise, breathe, tuck back into mother’s wake. They are doing what every mammal mother and baby do: moving toward food and a safer place.
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11/16/2025 - 06:55
Rescue operations in Wales, submerged railway lines in Cornwall – these events are ever more common. So why have we utterly failed to prepare?
As autumn blurs into winter, the news is once again filling up with a familiar story: overflowing rivers, inundated streets and overwhelmed infrastructure. Since Friday, England, Wales and Ireland have been hit by the storm the Spanish meteorological agency has elegantly named Claudia, with grim results. One place in particular massively bore the brunt of it all: the Welsh border town of Monmouth, where the raging River Monnow spilled into the streets, people had to be rescued from their homes and drones captured aerial views of the scene, showing fragile-looking buildings suddenly surrounded by a huge clay-brown swamp.
Claudia and her effects made it into the national headlines – but mostly, local and regional floods now seem too mundane to attract that kind of attention. Eleven days ago, Cumbria saw submerged roads, blocked drains and over 250 flood-related problems reported to the relevant councils. Railway lines in Cornwall were submerged; in Carmarthen, in west Wales, there were reports of the worst floods in living memory. But beyond the areas affected, who heard about these stories? Such comparatively small events, it seems, are now only to be expected.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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