Geoffrey Lean

About time! The Government is to advise Britons this autumn to stock up on food, water and other essentials to protect themselves against disruption in an increasingly unstable world. Many other countries took this sensible step years ago. inews.co.uk/news/politic...

We spend more than 33 times as much on destroying the life that sustains us as we do on preserving it. A staggering $7.3 trillion is spent each year in activities that devastate nature, compare to $220 billion on ones that assist it. www.unep.org/resources/st...

The world is “entering uncharted waters” with the developing El Niño, expected to be the strongest in 1000 years, warns UN Sec-Gen, as it will be piling heat into an already rapidly warming climate. Next year will “blow apart” the record for the hottest year. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Swanambulation. The siblings seem to have fallen out...

The enterprising @theipaper.com invited nine chiefs of England’s notorious water companies to swim in their own bathing waters. Not a single one accepted. Now why do you think that could be? inews.co.uk/news/water-f...

There’s a one in four chance that a whole UK city or town will be “catastrophically” deprived of water by a cyberattack or climate change, say leaked official documents. Govt preparing to issue advice to stock up on food and water in a dangerous world. www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

Really excellent mustread by @samfr.bsky.social on the increasingly tortuous, but often effective, arguments being made against action on climate change. samf.substack.com/p/how-to-kil...

Five million hectares of desertified Sahel land has been restored by letting the surviving roots of long-felled trees regrow, when tree planting failed. Reviving this “underground forest”, which I first covered 15 years ago, has now spread to 20 countries. www.optimistdaily.com/2026/08/how-...

About time! The Government is finally preparing official advice to Britons to stock up on food and other essentials in the face of increasing food insecurity, cyberspace attacks, pandemics and climate change. Other Western nations issued it years ago. www.ft.com/content/5811...

New plans to let mayors overrule local authorities on building big housing estates and tower blocks are anti-democratic and the next stage in a mendacious, authoritarian campaign to undermine planning and ruin the Green Belt. My latest for the @dailymail.co.uk. www.dailymail.com/debate/artic...

Britain is gathering in its worst harvest in more than 40 years. food prices are already rising and farmers are warning of shortages within months. www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

This is the energy/development solution for millions of Third World villages that grids will never reach. Iraq communities are electrifying themselves through installing decentralised solar power. www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Urgent climate action is an “important glue” holding much of Labour’s coalition together, reports @luketryl.bsky.social of @moreincommonuk.bsky.social. So it is essential for @andyburnham.bsky.social that he makes progress towards net zero. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

There’s a huge disconnect on climate between the public and the elite Westminster/Whitehall/media bubble. Vast majority of people rightly link heatwaves with it, but other research has found that two thirds of newspaper articles on them failed to mention it.

Research on the last time the world had high CO2, 56m years ago, has exploded the denier claim that the increased “‘plant food‘ will green the Earth. Fossils show that forests did thicken for a while, but then died, so the result was “browning”, not greening. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Excellent from @channel4news.bsky.social, again ahead of the rest of the media by leading on the climate crisis as the cause of the fires and heat, and calling the Government’s total lack of action to account. @michaelujacobs.bsky.social right on the button as usual.

Biteback. The clean energy lobby, including renewables firms, has funded successful electoral challenges to political opponents. I dislike big money in politics, but guess it’s understandable given the vast amounts fossil fuel interests spend….. www.politico.com/news/2026/08...

A long-running scandal. When I first exposed polluters in 1971 - naming names by getting round a law that then made that illegal (!) - the Government replied that the UK’s rivers would be clean within five years. just look at them not five, but 55, years later. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Europe has saved €72 billion by scaling up solar and wind power to replace fossil fuel imports since the invasion of Ukraine, reports the Statistical Review of World Energy. In just four years the two renewables shot up from 19% to 30% of EU power supplies. cleantechnica.com/2026/08/05/e...

Some good news. Coal has just slipped below 50% of China’s electricity generation for the first time: the amount burned is expected to peak in 2030. It’s capacity expected to be exceeded by solar this year. Long way to go but the coal addiction seems to be weakening. www.forbes.com/sites/curren...

May seem counterintuitive, but solar parks above fields can actually boost crops, as here. In another case it increased yield by 30% through providing shelter. Sheep and panels can also go well together. Doesn’t apply universally, of course, but still good news. www.canarymedia.com/articles/sol...

Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.

A review of over 500 studies has established that climate change is “reshaping” plankton communities in uk seas. Worrying since these form the very base of the marine food web, so there are potentially serious impacts on sea life and fisheries. oceanographicmagazine.com/news/from-pl...

Big oil is increasingly pulling out of the North Sea.This suggests that the environmentalists’ description of a fast diminishing field is much truer than Trump‘s assertion (influencing Burnham) that it is a huge resource companies are itching to exploit. oilprice.com/Latest-Energ...

As birth rates fall, more than 100 English schools have had to close, disturbing children and communities. How long will it be, as Western societies continue to age, before they start competing to attract, rather than repel, young immigrants? theconversation.com/falling-birt...

Extraordinary. Research concludes that the impact of climate change on vegetation in the tropics - home to over half of the world’s species - in the next 24 years will be the same as has occurred naturally over the last 3.3 million years. theconversation.com/impact-of-cl...

Madness. Trump has killed or cut back 216 clean energy projects in the last 18 months, cisting the US ecinomyb$90 billion, and sacrificing the creation of 470,00 new jobs. www.ecoportal.net/uk/216-clean...

You’d think the ’ships of the desert’ could cope with global warming. But no. Nearly half of Somalia’s camel-owning households have lost at least one to drought, research finds. In parts of the north of the country this rises to almost three-quarters. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Water companies have discharged over 117,000 hours of #sewage from 1165 overflows near popular #bathing beaches so far this summer, reports @sascampaigns.bsky.social. Yet, it adds, the public is often told that the water at them is “excellent”. www.ft.com/content/1fd5...

Amazing Bhutan, the country that absorbs over ten times as much carbon as it emits, and measures its economy by Gross National Happiness. Forty years ago I was privileged to be one of the first western journalists to tour it, in one of the highlights of my career. spacedaily.com/m-almost-eve...

Nine million tonnes of grain have so far been lost across Europe in the drought. France‘s maize harvest lowest in 50 years. Romanian farmers have lost over a million acres of crops. 20,000 people dead, including 2200 in UK. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A new worry from the Iran war. Scientists warn that the hulls of 1500+ ships trapped for months by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz will be gathering life that they could spread worldwide when they open , causing a “massive” invasive species crisis. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/thou...

Secret documents suggest that almost 90% of 300,000 U.K. sewage spills over the last two years may nave been illegal, but gone unpunished. The new ministers must finally get a grip. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Rivers are drying up across Europe as the drought goes on. The Loire is just a dry bed in places. The Rhine is only a meter deep at a critical gauge. The Danube, says an official Roumanian agency, is at its lowest for 30 years.The Elbe and Po also in trouble. www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-chan...

disappointing that @edmilibandmp.bsky.social isn’t chancellor. But he can still have a big impact on climate internationally as foreign secretary, as some predecessors did. And appointing @miattafahnbulleh.bsky.social to his old job is very good news. Much depends on @andyburnham.bsky.social.

Net zero denial gone madder than ever. In the midst of its massive heatwave, the Trump administration has scrapped over 1600 pages on how to save energy, and thus cut bills, from its Department of Energy website. Who is it serving, the people or the utilities? www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Analysis of nearly 2,500 reports in the UK’s nine main national daily publications found that almost three quarters of them failed to mention climate change and less than one in 20 referred to net zero. Shamefully bad journalism, apart from anything else. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

As if the increasingly scorching heat were not enough. Warming waters from climate change have brought a plague of silver-cheeked toadfish - the second most poisonous vertebrate on Earth, with a bite that can crunch through bone - to the Med’s bathing waters. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

If the US dramatically changed course and achieved net zero by 2050, it could save the lives of 33,000 of its people every year, new research suggests. That would mainly be the result of cutting the air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels. phys.org/news/2026-07...

Encouraging, if we act. The expected disruption of the Gulf Stream - giving the U.K. the climate of Labrador and causing devastation worldwide - could be avoided if we cut emissions now, concludes new research. Will governments listen? www.newscientist.com/article/2532...

More than a million people a year now die because of antibiotic resistance. A huge failure of the market - profit-obsessed companies don’t want to develop drugs only used for short periods - and of governments refusing to take action. It will get worse. www.chemistryworld.com/news/metabol...

Every £1 of public money invested in net zero delivers between £2.20 and £4..10 in return, reports top economist @mazzucatom.bsky.social im this wide ranging article. Drawn from official figures, this gives the lie to all those claims about it’s vast cost of. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Some deniers cite the 1976 heatwavE as proof that the climate is not changing. These scientists looked into it, and have concluded that the present one is far worse, thanks to global heating. “We are living in a very different climate to 50 years ago”. theconversation.com/we-recreated...

This is crazy. Putting solar panels over car parks is a win-win-win, producing clean energy, shading the cars, and protecting the countryside. France requires it. But the U.K. government has inexplicably rejected it. eastangliabylines.co.uk/environment/...

Excellent piece by Jonathan Freedland on the idiocy of climate denial - and media distraction from the crisis -in the midst of an unprecedented heatwave that climate scientists have firmly attributed to global heating. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Some 1.6 million children, including 700,000 babies, are at serious risk, because of living in overheated homes in increasing heatwaves, expert analysis has concluded. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Sceptics about climate change often point out that many more people die of cold than heat.They are right, for now. But research predicts that rising temperatures will kill more people from heat than they save from the cold, making it the greater cause of death. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Climate change sceptics often say that cold kills many more than heat. They are right, for now. But research shows that rising temperatures kill more than they save, so that heat becomes the greater cause of death in a warmer world. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Worryingly, microplastics seem to head for the brain. Typically ours now contain about a spoonful of them, much more than ten years ago. www.futura-sciences.com/en/more-micr...