- The Guardian continues to evolve its response to the climate emergency, and this week published a climate change dashboard.
- At their annual conference, Britain’s Liberal Democrat party voted to back a Universal Basic Income. The Lib Dems are not the force they were, but it marks another step towards the mainstream for Basic Income. (The Green Party also supports BI)
- Governments resist them, campaigners often demand them without necessarily thinking it through, so it’s useful to The Economist’s perspective on how ‘outright bans can sometimes be a good way to fight climate change‘.
- As an experiment, I’m dropping the latest posts from this week in at the bottom, for those catching up. Let me know if this is a helpful feature or not, and I might add it every week.
What we learned this week
Reuters’ investigation into global heatwaves has led them to conclude that we need a new term for them. They’re calling them heatstorms, and their report is an interesting crossover of journalism and science. On the subject of heatwaves, studies in Nature Health have calculated that there were 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer, the…
Let’s paint some roofs white
I’m doing a lot of work on overheating at the moment, and have been visiting schools to help them understand why their buildings get too hot in the summer and what they can do about it. One of the solutions that keeps coming up is painting roofs white. It’s well documented that white roofs reflect…
The science of hope
The Living Planet Report is produced every two years by WWF and the Zoological Society of London, serving as a regular health-check on wild nature. It’s not been positive news, and over the years its headline finding has become increasingly well known: that since 1970, average wildlife populations have declined by 73%. (This is frequently…
