Back in the 19th century, people used to boil penguins (sometimes alive) for theiroil. Millions of seals were driven inland from the beaches of sub-Antarctic islands like South Georgia and clubbed – pups, juveniles and adults – before being stabbed through the heart so their pelts could make fur coats. Whales were cruelly harpooned in their hundreds of thousands for their blubber and driven to the brink of extinction.

Thank goodness those days are over, and the Antarctic is now protected from all exploitation. Except that it isn’t. Each year massive Norwegian and Chinese supertrawlers visit the feeding grounds of recovering whale populations and vaccum up as much krill – the tiny crustacean that is food for whales, penguins and seals like – as they can take. Last year was the highest take for two decades, 620,000 tonnes of krill removed by Norway’s Aker QRILL and other trawling companies. I’ve calculated that this is enough krill to feed 850 blue whales for a whole season!

And almost the worst thing is that the Marine Stewardship Council – them of the blue tick – is about to re-certify Aker QRILL’s activities as ‘sustainable’ despite fears from scientists and conservationists that the competition for food may be hampering whale recovery. Witnesses have seen krill supertrawlers sailing right into pods of feeding whales in order to get to the densest krill swarms, literally hoovering up the whales’ food from right in front of them.

Please make sure you boycott all krill products – don’t EVER buy omega-3 krill oil supplements, for example, as vegan algal alternatives are easily available. And take care because krill also goes into pet food and fishmeal used in salmon farming. Most importantly, please also tell the MSC not to re-certify the damaging krill fishery. Time is running out; they’re due to announce the decision any day, and all the objections from conservation NGOs have so far been rejected.

Here’s the full shocking story on my Substack, and how you can help before it’s too late…

 

Key messages from our new paper in Nature – by Mark Lynas, Erle Ellis and Kwesi Quagraine.

Want to solve climate change? Then stop with the negativity. Yes, global warming is undeniably real and demands urgent reductions in the use of fossil fuels globally. But to achieve this we need to move the conversation away from negative framings like direct emissions cuts and reducing energy use and start talking about a more actionable approach: saving the world by accelerating the production of enormous amounts of clean power for a growing global economy.

For the full post, see my Substack.

Our paper in Nature, published 26 January 2026. In it we propose replacing the central focus on 1.5C – a goal which is being missed – with a new metric based on the rapidity of the clean energy transition.

International waters, also known as the high seas, make up 61% of the ocean and cover 43% of Earth’s surface — amounting to two-thirds of the biosphere by volume. They have been exploited since the seventeenth century for whales, and from the mid-twentieth century for fish, sharks and squid, depleting wildlife. Now, climate change is reducing the productivity of the high seas through warming and through depletion of nutrients and oxygen. Proposals to fish for species at greater depths and mine the sea bed threaten to wreak yet more damage, putting the ocean’s crucial role in maintaining the stability of Earth’s biosphere at risk.

[I’m a co-author on this Nature piece, which is open access and can be read here.]

The good news is that we might be about to solve the Fermi paradox. Many have long suspected that the reason why there don’t seem to be millions of talkative aliens out there in space is because when an intelligent civilisation develops the technology to enable interstellar communication it also develops weapons that enable it to quickly destroy itself.

So far, we’re matching exactly this trajectory. We’ve sent probes far beyond the solar system – and vast quantities of electronic data fizzing in all directions at the speed of light – but we’ve also got thousands of thermonuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert that can in just a few hours reduce our entire world to a dark, freezing wasteland.

Whether or not we can confound the apparent inevitability of this doomsday outcome is perhaps the ultimate test of our species-level intelligence. But the omens aren’t good. Russia and the United States currently have 1,500 fully deployed nuclear warheads and over 5,000 each in their total arsenals. China is racing to reach nuclear parity by 2030. The current geopolitical instability raises the risk of superpower world war to perhaps the greatest level since the hottest periods of the Cold War.

America’s ‘launch-on-warning’ posture means that ICBMs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) must be out of their silos and in the air while the incoming missile attack is still blips on a radar screen. Once launched ICBMs cannot be recalled, nor can their targets be altered. When warning is received of imminent attack, the US president has as little as six minutes to decide whether to launch an all-out retaliation that would destroy most life on Earth.

A major thermonuclear exchange would likely kill about 770 million people in blasts and city firestorms across the major combatant powers. Technical language can obscure the reality here: this means several hundred million people – women, children, men, the elderly – being burned alive. Many more would quickly die from radioactive poisoning, but the biggest killer would come after: a decade-long worldwide nuclear winter that would starve billions more to death and wreck our civilisation beyond repair.

And all for what? Nothing matters this much; not any current-day flashpoint or contested piece of territory. The probability of nuclear war in any single year is small, probably around 1%, but this compounds to a two-thirds risk over a century. We have been extremely lucky with past near-misses, from Black Saturday of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to the notorious ‘3am phone call’ incident in 1980 when President Carter was nearly woken in the night when 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles were erroneously displayed on warning screens.

We would be unwise to trust to luck forever. It should be obvious that nuclear weapons and human civilisation cannot co-exist together long-term. Either we abolish them or they abolish us. To do so we will need to build a citizens’ movement singularly focused on the goal of total abolition. This will need to be very different from the anti-nuclear movements of the past: we can learn a huge amount from both the successes and failures of CND and other previous campaigns. Nor is it about abolishing nuclear power, which is a vital technology to tackle the climate crisis and can even help remove warheads from our world by burning them up as fuel.

Nor can we be unilateralist, because the process can only work via simultaneous trust-building disarmament by all the nuclear nations. This new movement must involve millions of people of all political persuasions in every country of the world whose only reason for participation is that they want to survive. We have a good head start in the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, already signed by 93 countries. In other words, almost half the world’s nations are now on board with the drive towards abolition.

This should be an easy decision. Collective suicide is in nobody’s interest. We don’t need to burn alive millions of men, women and children, and usher in a nuclear winter that destroys the biosphere. But the first step is to break out of the fatalistic denial that views nuclear weapons as inevitable and the aim of abolishing them as impossible. That way the Fermi paradox can remain unanswered, and humanity can continue to flourish on our beautiful, living planet.

For the full published version see the NewScientist magazine.

The day of the war dawns like any other. There is no warning, and across New York people are beginning their daily routines. No air raid sirens wail and no early-warning messages flash on screens. Cars are being backed out of garages in the suburbs, while kids wearing colorful backpacks wait for school buses outside the shops. Harassed moms stuff sandwiches into packed lunches while a million espresso machines grind on kitchen counters. Outside an inner-city school, a group of 10-year-old girls wait to cross the road.

Looking up at the sky, one of the girls sees a brief metallic flash high up near the sun, far above the chrome spire of a Midtown skyscraper. She does not know it, but she has seen a re-entry vehicle from a 5 megaton (Mt) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and has only a few seconds left to live. Thinking about an upcoming maths test she has been working hard for, she looks down when the road-crossing signal turns to green. The girls are not even halfway across when the bomb explodes.

For the full extract, see LitHub

To buy the book, visit Bloomsbury Sigma

First, a word of warning. If you donate money to Greenpeace, you might think you’re helping save the whales or the rainforests. But in reality, you may be complicit in a crime against humanity. Last week, Greenpeace Southeast Asia and several other NGOs managed to stop the cultivation and use of vitamin A-enhanced rice in the Philippines, after the country’s court of appeal ruled in their favour.

In doing so, Greenpeace have blocked a multi-year, international, publicly-funded effort to save the lives and the eyesight of millions of children in some of the world’s poorest countries.

For the full article, see the Spectator (no paywall).

Climate scientists are running out of words to describe how far off the charts the latest temperature measurements are.

For the full post, please see the Alliance for Science…

Climate vulnerable developing countries were quietly jubilant today as COP27 in Egypt concluded with a landmark agreement to set up a new fund to address the ‘loss and damage’ being caused to their countries by the climate crisis.

The decision is in particular a win for the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), an informal group of 58 developing country parties representing the interests of 1.5 billion people, which has pushed for years – in the teeth of bitter resistance from developed countries like the US and those in Europe – to have a fund established to provide redress for the impacts of climate change in the most vulnerable developing countries.

For more, see the whole post on the Alliance for Science.

Abstract: Misinformation is a serious problem in scientific debates ranging from climate change to vaccines to nuclear power. In this study we quantitatively assess the phenomenon of misinformation – defined as information which is at variance with widely-accepted scientific consensus – on genetically modified crops and food (“GMOs”) in the mainstream and online news media over a two-year period. We found an overall falsehood rate of 9% with a potential readership of 256 million. None of the misinformation was positive in sentiment; most was negative. About a fifth of Africa’s media coverage on GMOs contained misinformation, a worrying finding given the potential for genetic engineering to deliver improved nutrition and food security in the continent. We conclude that misinformation about GMOs in the mainstream media is still a significant problem, and outranks the proportion of misinformation in other comparable debates such as COVID-19 and vaccines.

For the full scientific paper, see the journal GM Crops & Food.