The Amazon rainforest is burning. Brazil has had more than 72,000 fire outbreaks so far this year, an 84 per cent increase on the same period in 2018, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research.

Why is this happening? It is happening because people are systematically setting fires in the forest. This unimaginable, absurd, ecocidal action is probably the crime of the century so far. It could be terminal for human civilisation.

Death certificates and commemorative plaques aren’t something you’d normally associate with a glacier. But that is exactly how Iceland recently mourned the loss of 700-year-old Okjökull, the first of its major glaciers to die.

Our October Rebellion needs to be bigger than April’s was. Way bigger. Because this time, it has to be about not just getting verbal concessions from power, pious declarations of climate and ecological emergency without actual consequence. No; that’s just not good enough. Because this is the age of consequences. There’s no more time to play with…

The past month has witnessed an unprecedented turnaround of public opinion on the climate and ecological emergencies. When the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ broke out in mid-April, the media turned its gaze with almost unremitting hostility onto the inconvenience that it was bringing to motorised traffic in London. A fortnight later, everything had changed.

As climate change protestors continue to shut down major parts of London, Rupert Read explains why he’s joining them.

As a group of British academics and others who think and write about dangerous anthropogenic climate change, we have been impressed by your new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future.