Breaking Waves: Ocean News

WPP accused of breaching its climate policy after report reveals firm linked to twice as much oil advertising as US rivals A British advertising conglomerate has helped the oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP spend an estimated $1bn (£740m) on adverts in the US since the 2015 Paris agreement to tackle the climate crisis, a report shows. London-based WPP was the leading advertising group serving the US’s oil industry over the past decade, according to analysis by the climate investigations platform DeSmog. The figure is nearly twice the respective amounts linked to its US rivals Omnicom and Interpublic Group (IPG), which merged in November. Continue reading...

Elusive nightingale ‘doing well’ at Northward Hill, Kent, but experts cite concerns around loss of habitat The dawn chorus at RSPB Northward Hill in Kent is a riot of sound: the melodic robin, the two-tone cuckoo, the whitethroat’s scratchy warble. Even the garbling geese and mooing cows from the neighbouring Thames marshes add to the symphony. But in late April one energetic singer hogs the limelight. For a few weeks after arriving from West Africa, the nightingale spends the night – and early morning – in complex song. As it searches for a mate and marks its territory, its song is at times as sweet and tuneful as a soul singer, at others as frantic as a car alarm. Continue reading...

Despite popular support for a 25% levy on gas exports, Anthony Albanese opposes it and there is little discussion about how to reduce our usage Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates We’re yet to see next month’s Australian federal budget, so mark this column with an asterisk. But barring a late change it is likely it will do a remarkable thing: give fossil fuel industries what they want. That’s worth noting this week, as representatives from 57 national governments including Australia meet in Colombia for the first international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels. That gathering heard France aims to remove coal from its national grid by 2027, end oil dependency by 2045 and stop using fossil gas by 2050. Continue reading...

The ZSL has given us the word ‘zoo’, inspired artists and birthed a quarter of all Sumatran tigers. It has fascinated me since childhood – and the world since 1826 In the spring of 1826, two extraordinary things occurred in central London. The first was the death of Chunee the elephant. On 1 March at Cross’s Menagerie, upstairs in the Exeter ’Change on the Strand, Chunee was killed by a firing squad in the cramped enclosure where he’d been kept for the previous six years. By this point Chunee was more than three metres (10ft) tall and weighed at least five tonnes. Like all adult male elephants, he periodically went into musth, when his body was flooded with testosterone, making him aggressive and uncontrollable. After Chunee injured one keeper (apparently deliberately) and accidentally killed another, the proprietor, Edward Cross, decided to have him destroyed. Continue reading...