Climate experts warn that US Kalshi and Polymarket users are ‘gamifying disasters’ as they bet on events like heatwaves and daily temperatures
Online prediction markets, saturated by money staked on sport, crypto and politics, have now set their sights on a promising new area of growth: betting on the future livability of the planet itself.
The rise of gamified predictions on the unfolding climate crisis, and shorter-term weather forecasts, has been underscored by a new deal that allows Kalshi, a leading online financial exchange, to access data from the Weather Company, owner of the Weather Channel, to verify weather-related betting outcomes.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
09/02/2026 - 10:00
09/02/2026 - 09:29
Campaigners say pheasants and partridges reared ‘on industrial scale’ do not have same protections as chickens
The government is considering a crackdown on pheasant shooting in England as part of a consultation on strict new animal welfare laws that would affect shoot organisers.
Ministers are already considering plans for the issuing of licences for those who run game bird shoots. The proposals mean anybody associated with wildlife crime, such as the poisoning or shooting of birds of prey, would be banned from hosting shooting events.
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09/02/2026 - 08:44
Lack of information raises fears over environmental impact of the AI boom
UK politics live – latest updates
The UK government does not know what the country’s datacentres are being used for despite fears over the growing environmental impact of the AI boom.
When asked in a freedom of information (FoI) request who was using the largest sites and what for, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said it did “not hold the requested information”. The ministry has since been dissolved.
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09/02/2026 - 07:16
US energy department warns of potential for outages in PJM Interconnection, serving 67 million from DC to Chicago
The risk of power outages is expected to escalate across a broad swath of the United States on Wednesday as intense heat will test the capacity of electricity supplies serving millions of homes and businesses from the midwest through the mid-Atlantic.
The US Department of Energy warned of the potential for heightened blackout risks in the PJM Interconnection, the largest US electric grid, which serves 67 million people in a territory stretching from Washington DC to Chicago.
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09/02/2026 - 07:00
Designers are rethinking one of New York City’s most polluted sites with climate adaptation and community benefits
The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent
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09/02/2026 - 05:00
I will calmly read all the threatening letters and await the court case against me. But I will take a stand even if our government won’t
I can’t even remember when I decided to stop paying the sewage element of my Thames Water bill. It might have been after reading this headline from the Guardian in July 2025: “Serious pollution incidents by English water companies rose 60% last year,” with the subheading: “Environment Agency records 75 serious incidents among total of 2,800, with Thames Water being worst offender.”
Living in London means that my supplier is Thames Water, which makes a profit out of pollution. I decided that if the government wouldn’t act, I could at least do my part and not pay for this travesty.
Jenny Jones is a Green party peer
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09/02/2026 - 05:00
Bangladeshi complainants allege Rampal power station’s pollution and climate risks threaten the Sunderbans, a world heritage site
Barclays Bank is facing a formal complaint over its financial links to a coal-fired power station near the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and home to millions of people in Bangladesh and India.
Three complainants from the region have submitted a case to the UK government’s Office for Responsible Business Conduct, alleging that the British bank breached international guidelines by underwriting companies involved in the emission-heavy Maitree super thermal power project, also known as the Rampal power plant.
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09/02/2026 - 02:00
Arthur Downing, author of Power and the People: A History of British Energy, says all-encompassing rapid transition will need a mutualised system
Have you ever wondered why it is that most houses in the UK are reliant on gas boilers? Not what’s stopping more people from replacing them with heat pumps, but instead why and how the gas boiler became so ubiquitous in the first place?
Arthur Downing, the author of the new book Power and the People: A History of British Energy, can tell you exactly why. “We only have boilers in our houses because of a state-owned enterprise that went into everybody’s home and installed natural gas-suitable appliances at no direct cost,” he says. The nationalised gas industry of the 1940s to the 1980s, which oversaw this huge project, was for three decades one of the “most dynamic, innovative, efficient industries in Britain”, Downing says. Yet few of us would use these terms to describe it as such now.
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09/02/2026 - 01:00
Study reveals that pesticide poisoning kills 11,000 people each year, with India accounting for nearly 60% of fatalities
Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.
Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402-433m cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.
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09/02/2026 - 00:45
In today’s newsletter: Communities from Scotland to India are pushing back against datacentres, warning they threaten energy supplies and the climate
Good morning. This summer, datacentres have become targets of resistance across the world. Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT, big tech has been lobbying for the creation of enormous new facilities. Many governments claim they’re essential in any country that wants to cash in on AI.
Campaigners argue datacentres drain resources and exacerbate the climate crisis. The Scottish National Party has backed a moratorium on new developments; so has the Greens. The boom has been immense, and so has the backlash. Today’s newsletter explains why.
UK politics | Andy Burnham has blamed Brexit and Margaret Thatcher for a decade of low growth in the UK, arguing that Britain needs to be brutally honest about having taken “a series of wrong turns” in the last 40 years.
Nepal-Tibet | A week on from the flash flooding disaster, authorities are urging relatives of the thousands of missing and dead to provide blood samples.
Middle East | The US has launched new airstrikes on Iranian targets, prompting counter strikes by Tehran targeting American interests in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, fuelling concerns about a wider renewal of hostilities.
Ukraine | Russia has opened a deadly new phase in its war against Ukraine by deliberately targeting the country’s railway network, with six employees killed on Tuesday in the latest strikes on Kyiv.
US news | Mark Carney has rebuked Donald Trump’s administration and urged officials in Washington to “start being serious” amid escalation trade tensions between the US and Canada.
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