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  A few days ago, I posted a short text about a small number of billionaires who own a massive share of the world’s wealth and the damage that kind of ownership does to the planet and everyone on it. What struck me most in the responses wasn’t anger but something closer to paralysis. So today I’m writing this: the problem isn’t just that billionaires have too much money. It’s that we’ve started acting as if they have the right to decide the future, our future. https://theclimatehistorian.su...

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  989 people in the U.S., out of 340 million, are billionaires. 3,428 people, out of 8.3 billion, worldwide as of March 2026. That's roughly one in every 2.4 million humans. A tiny group of the human population and yet they do disproportionate damage to the planet and its people. We are destroying the Earth to create wealth for these men. It doesn't have to stay this way. We can change this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pr/2026/03/10/forbes-40th-annual-worlds-billionaires-list-elon...

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  Climate change versus heritage: the little fight nobody asked for. Right now, heritage looks like it’s winning. But when the real showdown arrives, safe humans versus beautifully preserved furnaces from 1890, it’s not exactly a big dilemma. In the end, the moral obligation always wins. People get insulation. Nostalgia gets a “sorry about that.” https://www.lemonde.fr/en/money-investments/article/2026/08/10/french-state-heritage-architects-block-roof-insulation-projects-over-height-restricti...

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  This El Niño is projected to be the largest in at least 150 years El Niño has always returned. What has changed is the world it now returns to. https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/this-el-nino-is-projected-to-be-the

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  Be like her. (Illustration by Patrick Léger https://patrick-leger.com/) #reading #books

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  The El Niño climate pattern that’s strengthening in the Pacific Ocean is on track to be the largest one in at least 150 years. If current forecasts pan out, the #elnino will unleash a surge of heat from the ocean that, combined with human-induced global warming, will probably make next year the hottest on record. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02293-y

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  “I want us to be happy about the weather. I don't know whether something's happened to meteorologists to make you all a little bit fatalistic and harbingers of doom.” "Because I think there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of excess deaths. It will be brutal.” https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatehistorian/p/a-bit-warm-for-june?r=1qy42b&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web #climate #weather #extremetemps

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  Sometimes a single historical detail explains an entire era. When Alan Greenspan was sworn in, Ayn Rand was there in the Oval Office watching. That image says rather a lot about what happened next. https://open.substack.com/pub/marginalspace/p/the-fountainhead-of-all-our-problems?r=28pz0f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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  Across Europe, heat waves and droughts have increased the at‑risk‑of‑poverty rate by 1.1 percentage points, pushing an additional 5.6 million people into poverty between 2004 and 2022, a reminder that climate change is creating real hardship for people who never chose to face it. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/a-drying-and-heating-up-europe-is-deepening-poverty-and-inequality-study #climatechange #inequality

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  The word “uncharted” has become a journalistic cliché, especially in climate‑related reporting. Most people don’t consciously care about the word itself but journalists use it because it is safe, dramatic, and it presents uncertainty. They overuse it because they're struggling to describe a world where the baseline keeps shifting. When everything is unprecedented, language gets repetitive. https://www.ft.com/content/857d4917-b04b-4349-b90a-7f3cf7aabd3f?syn-25a6b1a6=1 #climatechange...

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  It’s astonishing how far greed can drive people. Already rich, they still grab for every last scrap, and they do it by denying millions the services they depend on to live. Some firms, like BlueCrest, 👇 were rebranding employees as “self‑employed partners” instead of staff, allowing both sides to dodge the higher taxes and National Insurance contributions that real employees must pay. Obviously, once the loophole closes, they hate it. https://www.ft.com/content/6b8cd156-c5bb-4cce-8c54-818fd1...

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  If there is one lesson to take from this latest heatwave, it is that Europe’s record-breaking heat is part of a broader climatic transformation that is gradually reshaping the continent. We're already testing the limits of what our infrastructure, hospitals, and institutions can absorb, and the only way to prevent those limits from being pushed further is the one we have known about for decades: a fast phase‑out of fossil fuels. https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatehistorian/p/does...

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  Greek shipping companies made almost $4bn carrying Russian oil in past three years. In the meantime, Russia hammers Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing tens of innocent civilians and children. https://www.ft.com/content/d8518934-3618-43dc-af91-63a948c9bae3?syn-25a6b1a6=1

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  British politics has finally completed its evolution, we’ve reached the stage where a man dressed as a bin stands as the most honest candidate in an entire constituency. Maybe he is the hero we deserve. https://www.ft.com/content/e68db443-bbc6-40b2-8ac6-c73691d40607?syn-25a6b1a6=1#comments-anchor

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  The Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Finland have co-authored an op-ed in The Economist on the new world order. The era of wishful geopolitical thinking is over, they write. As they put, we should stop daydreaming about the world we wish existed and start grappling with the one that’s actually in front of us. #politics https://archive.is/20260708184645/https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/07/08/prepare-for-a-world-of-ad-hoc-coalitions

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  The internet did not kill reading. It changed the way we read, rewarding fragments over depth, outrage over understanding and speed over thought. Meanwhile, misinformation is free and the truth increasingly sits behind a paywall. What happens to a society that can no longer finish a long article or follow a complicated argument? #reading #books https://marginalspace.substack.com/p/the-end-of-reading

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  Smoke from more than 100 active wildfires in northern Ontario have made Toronto’s air quality the current worst in the world and caused yellow, smoky air in cities across the north-east US. #climatechange #wildfires https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/15/wildfires-in-ontario-make-toronto-canada-air-quality-worst-in-world

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  It’s rocky and Earth‑like, it’s got a confirmed atmosphere, and it is conveniently located in the Goldilocks zone, meaning warm enough for liquid water and cool enough not to boil you alive. The only problem? It’s 49 light‑years away which with our current propulsion translates to “see you never.” But who knows, maybe we’ll crack warp travel just in time to escape the planet we’re busy rendering uninhabitable. #science #astronomy https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/16/atmosphere-l...

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  A summer in Greece, a few conversations, and what they reveal about humanity’s greatest challenge. The climate crisis is not only a battle against carbon. It is a battle against human psychology. Meet four characters we encounter whenever climate change enters the conversation: those who promise salvation, those who predict collapse, those who look away, and those who quietly worry. Which character do you recognise? https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/the-four-faces-of-climate-chang...

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  If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I’m fascinated by octopuses. They never stop surprising us. Scientists have discovered that some shallow-water octopuses carry a unique mutation that helps them build proteins with remarkable accuracy. When the same trick was added to E. coli, the bacteria made 50% fewer mistakes. Just when you think octopuses couldn't get any smarter, they prove you wrong. Again. https://www.science.org/content/article/molecular-quirk-unique-octopuses-makes-the...

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  Worth your time. 👇 The internet's most successful tradwives don't just bake bread. They've found a way to monetise submission. Funny how the loudest champions of ‘financial dependence’ tend to be the ones enjoying very comfortable financial independence. https://marginalspace.substack.com/p/the-business-of-being-a-tradwife

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  In case you haven’t noticed, ocean surface temperatures have already smashed their previous records. With the seas this hot and El Niño on the way, it’s hard to pretend we won’t see more temperature records fall soon. #climatechange #oceans #extremetemps

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  It’s hard to make someone who hasn’t experienced this heat understand how much it narrows your mental range. Without aircon, even ordinary tasks demand concentration, thoughts slow down, and the day feels less like something you live in than something you endure. I have spent more than 20 years carrying with me a persistent anxiety that surfaced with every new report and every new temperature record. Now that feeling has shifted into outright fury. https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatehisto...

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  A masterful news headline from our sizzling little planet. 👇 🔥 🌏 "Extreme heat cancels London climate change event on adapting to extreme heat" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/extreme-heat-event-london-cancelled-b3001379.html #climatechange #extremetemps

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  Before climate change became political, there was Santa Barbara. Today, I'm writing about how a 1969 offshore oil blowout in California shocked the American public and helped create the EPA and modern environmental law. Nixon, Vietnam, and a catastrophe that forced the United States to look in the mirror. https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/the-black-tide-that-made-america

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  The COP process has long been hostage to the veto of petrostate interests. What happened this week in Colombia may be the beginning of something different. 60 countries agreed to form a coalition committed to accelerating clean energy deployment and phasing out coal, oil, and gas. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/30/colombia-climate-talks-end-fossil-fuel-phaseout

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  Interesting reading. China’s Great Green Wall is one of the largest efforts to stop deserts from advancing, it's a vast band of new forests across northern China that acts as a barrier against desertification. It has succeeded where many similar projects have stalled or failed, giving other countries both a model to follow and lessons on what to avoid when planning their own greening programmes. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01102-w

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  "Democracy is now back to 1985 levels according to some metrics, with 72 percent of the world’s population now living under autocracy. Russia and China are less free today than 20 years ago. And so is the United States". -Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026 https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026

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  Today I'm writing about the drought in the United States. More than half (56%) of the country is now in drought. That number is easy to read and easier still to overlook. But on the ground, it translates into water shortages, rising wildfire risk, and a growing pressure on landscapes and communities that are not built to withstand this kind of strain. #climate #drought #USA https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatehistorian/p/half-of-the-united-states-is-now?utm_campaign=post-expan...

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  This week, The New Yorker dropped a bombshell profile on Sam Altman and #OpenAI, packed with leaked internal docs. The man is portrayed as a master manipulator, cunning yet clueless, unethical, and a pathological liar who barely grasps the tech he’s selling. Even his allies call him dangerous. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted