Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, analysis finds

The American poet and essayist weaves memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament into a tale of friendship in an age of existential crisis “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental,” writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. “Unless it isn’t.” The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us “to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for”. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall? The book begins with a friendship. Two young people – our narrator, and another she refers to only as “the theorist” – meet in college in the late 20th century, and are drawn to each other. They’re passionate; they’re idealistic; they’re committed to the activism of the time (“shantytowns were built on campus to protest apartheid South Africa”) and steeped in the texts and authors and philosophical conceits of the humanities. Over time, they develop a game. “When we spied each other during the day,” the narrator explains, “we had to collapse.”..

Copernicus warns of 'unprecedented strain' on world's oceans as El Nino and climate change drive up sea temperatures.

Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome Ronita Bardhan, Professor of Sustainable Built Environment and Health at the University of Cambridge. Extreme heat is no longer simply a question of climate exposure. It is a question of thermal safety, public health, energy security, urban design and inequality, explains Professor Bardhan. Her starting point is that, in an emergency, protecting human life must come first: people need immediate access to cooling, through shade, hydration, cooling centres, passive design or, where necessary, air conditioning. The challenge, she says, is not to choose between adaptation and mitigation, but to pursue both simultaneously.