Boiling Mad

In the latest repudiation of Rene Descartes, scientists have concluded that insects feel pain, which is bad luck for the 370 million crickets farmed every year for food. During the UK heatwave a fortnight after this announcement, households were urged to pour boiling water into wheelie bins to kill maggots, a.k.a. ickle baby insects. Aieeeeeeee! One of the biggest data centres in the world is being planned for a village the other side of the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. It’ll “harvest rainwater”, apparently, which is blatant greenwashing. The east coast gets much less rain than the west. Auchtertool has 320 days without rain per year. Birds in Donetsk are using fiber-optic drone wire to build their nests. A young engineer who left his studies to clean up ocean plastic has removed nearly 50 million kilograms of it, and has a plan for 90% of the rest. The Earth has tilted 80 centimetres, and the reason’s not good. George Monbiot: There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data.…