The world of sport has a new opponent: climate change.
In recent years, a world championship marathon was held at midnight to avoid the blistering sun. Professional athletes needed oxygen tanks to play during wildfire season in California. Players collapsed and play was suspended amid the heat and bushfire smoke at the Australian Tennis open.
In Warming Up, world-leading ecologist Madeleine Orr takes readers through a play by-play of how global warming is already impacting sport, and how the sports world can fight back.
We love to imagine the future. But why are ground-breaking future technologies always just around the corner, and never a reality?
Delving into the remarkable history of technology, The Long History of the Future introduces us to the clever scientists, genius engineers and eccentric innovators who first brought these ideas to life and have struggled to make them work since. By looking to the past and the future, Nicole Kobie shows how history always proves us wrong and how what lies ahead may not be what we imagine, but so much better.
The great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. But one of the world’s most extraordinary species faced an unthinking destruction, becoming extinct in 1844. But this wasn’t the end of the great auk story, as the bird went on to have a remarkable afterlife as the hunt for skins, eggs and skeletons became the focus for collectors.
In a book rich with insight and packed with tales of birds and of people, Tim Birkhead reveals previously unimagined aspects of the bird’s life before humanity, its death on the killing shores of the North Atlantic, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains. A symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation, The Great Auk tells the story of this remarkable species.
We are standing on a nuclear knife edge, with the world currently closer to superpower conflict than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Despite receiving very little attention, nuclear war is a far greater threat to humanity’s immediate survival than climate change, resulting in a decade-long global nuclear winter that would destroy most life on Earth. Six Minutes to Winter presents an unflinching view of the nuclear nightmare, but also describes how weapons can be taken off hair-trigger alert and ultimately abolished altogether.
