More doom and gloom

Asian floods affecting more people than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, plus the 2005 Kashmir and 2010 Haiti earthquakes combined says UN.

Russian heat wave unparalleled in 1,000 years and could kill tens of thousands of people. What is the global cost of Russia's heat wave? When you take into account the highest cost of wheat caused by Russia's cancellation of all wheat exports for the rest of the year, it runs into billions.

But before we begin pitying Russians too much, this piece of lunacy is one of the most depressing things I've heard this week.

The largest iceberg seen in almost fifty years recently calved off Greenland. Arctic melt this year is likely to be second or third worst on record, though will very much depend on prevailing weather conditions over the next few weeks. You can follow it here. But a soot cloud from burning Russian peatland could prove to be a wild card.

Fire and rain: how can we tell when extreme weather is linked to climate change?

Commodity speculation: the price of bread depends on the whims of Wall St, not just the productivity of farms. But remember that "for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent".

Big coal will continue to ensure US climate inertia, and without US momentum, the rest of the world will only reach small-scale and thoroughly inadequate agreements.

But at least we are cutting our throat more slowly in the Amazon.

Finally, perhaps the worst news of all comes from the Onion: Ecological disaster as millions of barrels of oil safely reach port.

Schadenfreude and BP investors

George Monbiot says he has no sympathy for investors burned by the BP share price crisis (BP shares have been haemorrhaging value almost as fast as, well, you know what). They were warned about the dangers many times, he says.

"Call me a hard-hearted bastard, but I'm finding it difficult to summon up the sympathy demanded by the institutional investors now threatening to sue BP. They claim that the company inflated its share price by misrepresenting its safety record. I don't know whether this is true, but I do know that the investors did all they could not to find out. They have just been presented with the bill for the years they spent shouting down anyone who questioned the company.

"They might not have been warned by BP, but they were warned repeatedly by environmental groups and ethical investment funds. Every year, at BP's annual general meetings, they were invited to ask the firm to provide more information about the environmental and social risks it was taking. Every year they voted instead for BP to keep them in the dark."

Personally, I wonder whether his argument doesn't go far enough. Those who have seen their shares or pensions losing value ought to actually be thankful that limited liability shareholding means that the most they can lose is the value of their shares. As partial owners of the company, they are not held responsible (beyond a certain point) for its actions, yet it was partially their failure in putting profits ahead of all other considerations that lead to the current mess.