This video from campaigning group Plane Stupid has just been released in UK cinemas. Grim viewing, which younger children might find upsetting, even if you tell them it’s all done on computers. I’m not letting my 11 year old see it, or she’ll never get on a plane again, no matter how necessary/useful it is. Are these shock tactics appropriate?

You’d never have guessed – climate change can have terrible effects on biodiversity levels! This study from York looks back in time at previous periods of rapid climate change and the impact they had on the planet. (It wasn’t good.)

BBC summary; Proceedings of the Royal Society article (open access); current situation in Greenland.

An article in PNAS confirms that traces from Homo sapiens and H. sapiens neanderthalis are intermingled at the Chatelperron site in France, strongly suggesting that the two types of human met and interacted at the site.

What finally did for the Neanderthals? It may be that climate change, resulting in a nasty cold snap about 24,000 years ago, killed the last remaining group of them, huddled on the south of the Iberian peninsula, near Gibraltar.

BBC summary here, original article in Quaternary Science Reviews here.

It looks like climate change may also have devastating effects on life within the ocean. This BBC report outlines how changes in wind patterns can cause huge “dead zones” on the ocean bottom.

Future changes in the global climate could have a catastrophic effect on highly mobile or migratory species, warns a UN report here.