The fate of any individual animal, even any species, is not, in the big scale of planetary history, in any way notable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t, indeed shouldn’t, mourn their loss.

On the individual: close studies of the northern bottlenose whale that died in the Thames last year shows human actions were a big factor in her lonely, tormented death at the age of six. (Her natural lifespan would have been at least 40 years.)

An analysis of the whale’s blubber and liver by a government laboratory in Essex showed her body was laced with toxic chemicals used in paints, electronics, pesticides and detergents. The most toxic were PCBs, banned in the 1970s.=
This finding suggests pollution may be reaching farther out to sea than previously thought, as northern bottlenose whales are deep-sea feeders.

In Vietnam, it is a whole species that is at risk –the saola, “which looks like an antelope but is related to cattle” – a species that the world only learnt existed a decade ago.

It was the first new large mammal discovered in half a century, but while the population then was thought to be quite sustainable, it has now crashed to less than 200, and its chances look very poor.

(Thanks Harry!) A nifty little web version of a booklet on waste from the UN Environment Programme. It is particularly good on bottled water – possibly the most ridiculous commodity to be shipped around the world: worldwide trade by value rose 25% between 2002 and 2004.

Santa’s home is melting: children and parents flying to Lapland this year are finding not the usual heavy snowdrifts and -20C temperatures, but messy slush.

A spokesman for First Choice holidays, the British tour operator that takes thousands of Britons to Lapland, said yesterday that the conditions were “incredibly unusual”. However, they have occurred in the week that US scientists warned that the Arctic region is now warming so fast that all the ice in the Arctic ocean, which covers the North Pole, could melt away in as little as 35 years – meaning extinction for polar bears, which depend on the floating ice to hunt.

Now I wonder how all of those Briton tourists got there? Yes, that was a rhetorical question – of course they flew, adding to the greenhouse gases that are destroying the very thing they went to see.

At home, it is going to be the warmest year in Britain on record.

The record year has astounded scientists. “What’s phenomenal about this year is that some of these months have broken records by incredible amounts. This year it was 0.8C warmer in autumn and 0.5C warmer between April and October than the previous warmest years. Normally these records are broken by around one tenth of a degree or so,” said Prof Jones.

But it is no surprise to the geranium on my (rather windy and east-facing) balcony – it is still actively flowering now – when it should be dead from cold.

There’s talk of the government introducing personal carbon rationing (gosh, wonder where they got that from, surely not Green Party policy…), but some people have started already, with carbon rationing action groups.

A CRAG is a group of people who have decided to act together to reduce their individual and collective carbon footprints. They do this in annual cycle. First they set themselves an annual emissions target or “carbon ration”. Then they keep track of their emissions over the year by keeping a record of their household energy use and private car and plane travel.
Finally, at the end of the year, they take responsibility for any “carbon debt” (i.e. emissions over and above their ration) that they have built up. All carbon debts are paid into the group’s “carbon fund” at an agreed rate per kilo of CO2 debt. The fund is then distributed as agreed by the members of the group.