Climate change

A Moon Shaped Pool

A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead’s ninth studio album, released in 2016. It features Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral arrangements, includes older material such as 'True Love Waits', and incorporates strings and choral vocals by the London Contemporary Orchestra. The album was released digitally in May 2016 and physically in June via XL Recordings. Its sessions were affected by personal events including Nigel Godrich's father's death and Thom Yorke's separation from and later loss of his wife Rachel Owen, who died from cancer in 2016. The album was promoted with music videos for 'Daydreaming' and 'Burn the Witch' and received critical acclaim, appearing on year-end best-album lists and earning Grammy nominations including Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Song for 'Burn the Witch'. It became Radiohead's sixth UK number-one album and reached number three in the US. It was also nominated for the Mercury Prize, making Radiohead the most shortlisted act in Mercury history. The album was recorded at La Fabrique studio near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, after initial work began in September 2014. Radiohead had previously attempted to write a theme for the James Bond film Spectre, but both submissions were rejected and later released independently. The album's release marked a return to more emotionally resonant and less cynical lyrical themes compared to earlier works, conveying wonder and amazement rather than alienation or political anger. It was followed by extensive touring across Europe, Japan, and North and South America, featuring Clive Deamer on drums until 2018, and later Chris Vatalaro on the 2025 tour. The album's production involved long-standing collaborators Nigel Godrich (producer), Stanley Donwood (cover artist), and Paul Thomas Anderson (music video director).

Titanic Rising

A soft rock record about the world ending — and why holding someone’s hand still matters.

Afire

Christian Petzold’s Afire follows a brittle young writer whose self-absorption fractures under the pressure of shared space, honest criticism, and an approaching forest fire. Set in a Baltic holiday home, the film traces his slow disorientation as relationships shift and catastrophe interrupts narrative control. With restrained performances and unadorned craft, it asks how people begin to see clearly only after their stories stop holding.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, recasts Godzilla as an ecological corrector confronting Hedorah — a monster born from industrial pollution. Shot in 35 days on a tight budget, it blends live action, animation, and stop-motion to deliver a blunt, child-facing warning about smog, acid rain, and systemic toxicity. Though criticised on release for tonal inconsistency and the infamous flying-Godzilla sequence, it has since gained stature as a singular, ideologically committed entry in the franchise — less entertainment than intervention.

First Reformed

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed follows Reverend Ernst Toller, a pastor of a dwindling Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York, as he confronts alcoholism, grief over his son’s death in Iraq, and escalating despair over climate catastrophe. When a pregnant parishioner seeks counsel for her radical-environmentalist husband, Toller is drawn into a crisis of faith, vocation, and bodily integrity. Shot in strict 1.33:1 aspect ratio with austere compositions and near-silent sound design, the film unfolds with liturgical slowness, building toward a climax that rejects catharsis in favour of raw, unresolved human contact.

Typhoon Haiyan

Typhoon Haiyan reached one-minute sustained winds of 315 kilometres an hour before striking the Philippines on 7 November 2013, at the time the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded by wind speed, and it went on to make six separate landfalls across the Visayas. Its storm surge, reaching 5.2 metres at Tacloban's airport, proved deadlier than the wind itself, destroying an estimated ninety percent of the city and even flooding the evacuation centre meant to shelter residents from the storm. The disaster killed at least 6,300 people, displaced over six million, and caused roughly 2.2 billion dollars in damage, making it the costliest typhoon in Philippine history, while triggering a large international relief effort complicated by damaged infrastructure and, controversially, an initially very small pledge of aid from China.

Bushfires in Australia

Bushfires have killed roughly eight hundred people in Australia since 1851, through a recurring sequence of major disasters including Black Friday in 1939, Ash Wednesday in 1983, and Black Saturday in 2009, the country's deadliest single fire event with 173 deaths. The Black Summer season of 2019 to 2020 surpassed them all in scale, burning around twenty-four million hectares, killing thirty-three people directly and contributing to a further 417 deaths through smoke inhalation, and causing an estimated 100 billion dollars in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in Australian history. Roughly forty percent of fires in the country's southeast between 1997 and 2009 were deliberately lit, but Black Summer's scale is tied by the sources to record heat, prolonged drought, and a debate over climate change and fire management that remains unresolved in Australian politics.

Floods in Australia

Australia's deadliest recorded flood remains the 1852 Gundagai disaster, which killed 89 people, but the country has continued to suffer serious flooding through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including a 1934 Yarra River flood that killed 35 people in Victoria. The 2010 to 2011 Queensland floods, driven by a strong La Niña and Tropical Cyclone Tasha, affected more than 200,000 people and killed 33, including nine in a sudden flash flood at Grantham that Premier Anna Bligh described as an inland tsunami. Total economic costs reached an estimated 14.1 billion Australian dollars, and a subsequent legal battle over whether mismanagement of the Wivenhoe Dam worsened Brisbane's flooding ran until the High Court declined a final appeal in 2022.

Dust Bowl

Severe drought combined with farming practices that had stripped the Great Plains of native grasses produced a decade of catastrophic dust storms through the 1930s, peaking with the storm known as Black Sunday in April 1935. Federal programmes under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal introduced soil conservation measures that cut blowing soil by roughly two-thirds by 1938, but recent scholarship has challenged the popular image of a mass exodus, arguing migration out of the Plains rose only slightly compared with the previous decade.

2003 European heatwave

The summer of 2003 was Europe's hottest since at least 1540, with temperatures reaching 47.3 degrees Celsius in Portugal and record highs across Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, and it is estimated to have killed around 72,000 people across the continent. France suffered the heaviest toll, somewhere between roughly 14,800 and 19,000 deaths, driven less by the heat itself than by nights that stayed unusually warm, housing without air conditioning, and a health and social care system that emptied out for the traditional August holiday just as elderly people living alone needed it most. The scandal cost Health Minister Jean-François Mattei his job the following year and led France to build a national heat wave response plan that has measurably reduced death tolls in subsequent hot summers.

Fall of Angkor

Angkor was besieged and occupied twice by the Ayutthaya kingdom before a final seven-month siege in 1430 forced the Khmer court to abandon it in 1431 for the site of modern Phnom Penh. Historians attribute the fall to some combination of military pressure, drought revealed only by modern tree-ring analysis, ecological strain from the city's own irrigation system, and a religious shift away from the older cult of divine kingship. Many temples remained in use long after the court's departure, and Sanskrit gave way gradually to Middle Khmer rather than the culture vanishing all at once.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The Western Roman Empire's collapse, conventionally dated to 476 AD when the Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the emperor Romulus Augustulus, followed a century of Gothic and other Germanic incursions, military strain and repeated civil war. Historians propose climatic, epidemiological, economic, political and religious explanations, and disagree sharply about whether to describe the process as a catastrophic fall or a more gradual transformation into successor kingdoms that preserved much of Roman law, language and administration.

Kyoto Protocol

Adopted in 1997 and taking effect in 2005 once Russia's ratification met the treaty's entry threshold, the Kyoto Protocol bound thirty-seven industrialised countries to specific greenhouse gas reduction targets against a 1990 baseline. All thirty-six parties assessed for the first commitment period complied with their targets, yet global emissions rose by roughly a third between 1990 and 2010, a gap that shaped the Paris Agreement's later shift toward voluntary national pledges rather than binding international targets.

Renewable energy

Carl Sagan

Charles David Keeling

Coral bleaching

Eunice Newton Foote

Milankovitch cycles

Ice core

James Lovelock

Makoko Floating School

Alexandra Kehayoglou

Diébédo Francis Kéré

Trina Solar

Anglo American plc

ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil is the largest U.S.-based oil and gas company. It was formed in 1999 by merging Exxon and Mobil. It is vertically integrated across oil and gas and its chemicals division. It produces about 3% of the world’s oil and 2% of global energy. In 2024, it emitted 610 Mt of CO2 — 1.58% of global emissions. It has faced widespread criticism and litigation over environmental incidents, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and for decades of climate change denial despite internal scientific accuracy.

Rosneft

China National Petroleum Corporation

Abu Dhabi National Oil Company

ConocoPhillips

DTE Energy

Wind power

Direct air capture

Lagos

Anti-consumerism

Deep ecology

Solarpunk

Sharing economy

Surf culture

Palm oil

Polar desert

Holocene extinction

Borneo lowland rain forests

Boreal forest of Canada

Theobroma cacao

Congolian rainforests

Coral Triangle

Dracaena cinnabari