Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, has indirectly denounced the Trump campaign’s policy on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine as “proposals of surrender” as the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington to present his own “victory plan”.

Addressing Zelenskyy at the White House, Harris said that “some in my country” would pressure Ukraine to accept a peace deal in which it surrendered its sovereign territory and neutrality in order to make peace with Vladimir Putin.

“These proposals are the same as those of Putin, and let us be clear, they are not proposals for peace,” she said. “Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.”

While she did not mention Donald Trump or JD Vance by name, those terms for peace closely resemble ones laid out by the Republican vice-presidential nominee in an interview earlier this month.

Zelenskyy had publicly denounced Vance as “too radical” after those remarks, sparking a conflict with Trump allies that has culminated with accusations of election interference and Republican calls for Ukraine to fire its ambassador to Washington.

In an apparent U-turn late on Thursday, Trump told reporters he would meet Zelenskyy at Trump Tower in New York on Friday morning.

At a press conference he rejected Harris’ criticisms and insisted that he only wants to stop the “horror show that’s gone on”.

When asked if Ukraine should give up territory, Trump was non-committal, saying: “Let’s get some peace … We need peace. We need to stop the death and destruction.”

Before announcing the meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump posted on social media a purported message from the Ukrainian president asking to see him. The message, which was not confirmed by Ukrainian officials, said “we have to strive to understand each other.” The decision to publicly disclose what appeared to be private communications was a reminder of the tension that has been brewing between Trump and Zelenskyy.

Harris’s remarks came after Zelenskyy met Joe Biden at the White House for the formal presentation of Zelenskyy’s high-stakes proposal, which he has said can end the war with Russia with additional American aid.

The White House issued a short statement after the meeting, saying that the “two leaders discussed the diplomatic, economic, and military aspects of President Zelenskyy’s plan and tasked their teams to engage in intensive consultations regarding next steps”.

“President Biden is determined to provide Ukraine with the support it needs to win,” the statement said.

Zelenskyy has kept the details of the plan secret, but US officials have said it includes additional American aid to prevent a Ukrainian rout on the battlefield and “provide the [Ukrainian] people with the assurance that their future is part of the west”.

Zelenskyy faces an uphill battle in securing support for the plan, because of caution among senior officials in the Biden administration about providing Russia with a pretext to escalate the conflict further, and the looming November presidential elections that could lead to a re-election of Donald Trump.

Before the meeting, Biden announced more than $8bn in military assistance to Kyiv, calling it a “surge in security assistance for Ukraine and a series of additional actions to help Ukraine win this war”.

The aid includes the provision of a medium-range “glide bomb” munition fired from fighter jets that would allow Ukrainian forces to strike Russian troops and supply lines at safer distances.

The allocation included $5.5bn from the Ukraine security assistance initiative fund by the end of the year, as well as an additional $2.4bn in security assistance via the Department of Defense.

The package includes additional Patriot air defense batteries and missiles, unmanned aerial systems, and measures to strengthen Ukraine’s defense industrial base, Biden said. The US will also expand training for additional F-16 fighter pilots, with an extra 18 pilots to be trained next year.

But Biden was not expected to grant a key Ukrainian request that has been supported by the UK – permission to use arms such as long-range Atacms ballistic missiles to strike targets deeper inside Russia – due to fears of escalating the conflict with Russia.

“There is no announcement that I would expect [on that],” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters before the meeting.

Zelenskyy said in a social media post: “We will use this assistance in the most effective and transparent way possible to achieve our main common goal: a victorious Ukraine, a just and lasting peace, and transatlantic security.”

Biden also announced that he would convene a high-level meeting of the Ukraine defense contact group to coordinate aid to Ukraine among more than 50 allies as he enters the lame-duck period of his final three months in office.

US media have reported that the Biden administration and European allies have been skeptical of Zelenskyy’s plan to achieve victory, which is understood to need to secure maximal support from the west before potential negotiations with Russia.

“I’m unimpressed. There’s not much new there,” a senior official told the Wall Street Journal.

Zelenskyy had said the plan included decisions that can be taken “solely” by the United States and “is based on decisions that should take place from October through December” – meaning the end of Biden’s term in office.

The meeting came amid rising tensions between Zelenskyy and Trump, who has attacked the Ukrainian leader for “making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president: me”.

Zelenskyy, in an interview with the New Yorker published this week, said he believed Trump “doesn’t really know how to stop the war” and criticised Vance for describing a vision for peace that included Ukraine ceding territories currently occupied by Russia.

Before the meetings, Zelenskyy met members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Republican, accused Zelenskyy of election interference and demanded he fire his ambassador to Washington over a visit to an ammunitions factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Johnson claimed the Ukrainian ambassador had failed to invite any Republicans to the event and called it a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”.

Zelenskyy sought to reduce tensions on Thursday as he thanked the US for the new arms package and praised political leaders’ “strong bipartisan support” in “Ukraine’s just cause of defeating Russian aggression”.

Nonetheless, US and European officials have noted with varying levels of alarm the potential for a Trump administration to sharply reduce US aid to Ukraine in order to force Zelenskyy to accept terms for a ceasefire.

Asked whether the Democrats wanted to “Trump-proof” aid to Ukraine before a potential Trump presidency, a senior state department official said: “I don’t ever talk in those terms” but that the primary goal was to make sure Ukraine “has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things”.

“At the end of the year, regardless of who wins our election in December, as at the end of this fighting season, Zelenskyy and Putin need to look at the battlefield and say, here’s what we think next year will look like,” the official said.

“And the primary factor there is, do I think the other side has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things?”

China’s efforts to achieve maritime military parity with the US have suffered a serious blow after its newest state-of-the-art nuclear submarine sank in a dock, American officials have confirmed.

The incident happened last May or June at the Wuchang shipyard near Wuhan – the same city where the Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have originated – and came to light, thanks to satellite imagery, despite efforts by the country’s communist authorities to stage a cover-up.

A US defence official told Reuters that the Zhou-class vessel – first of a new kind of Chinese submarines and distinctive for its X-shaped stern that aids manoeuvrability – is believed to have been next to a pier when it sank.

It is not known if there were any casualties – or if the submarine had any nuclear fuel onboard at the time, although experts have deemed that likely, according to the Wall Street Journal, which initially broke the story. The submarine was eventually salvaged but it is believed that it will take many months before it can be put to sea.

American officials say they have no indication that Chinese authorities have checked the water or nearby environment for radiation.

There has been no acknowledgment of the incident from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the official name for the Chinese armed forces.

The Journal reported that the first indication that something unusual had occurred came in the summer when Thomas Shugart, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former US submarine officer, noted irregular activity of floating cranes – which he had seen on satellite images – on social media.

Shugart suggested that there may have been an accident involving a submarine but did not know that it was nuclear-powered.

“Can you imagine a US nuclear submarine sinking in San Diego and the government hushes it up and doesn’t tell anybody about it? I mean, holy cow!” Shugart said.

The unnamed US defence official told Reuters that the incident and the wall of silence shrouding it raised serious questions about the Chinese military’s competence and accountability.

“In addition to the obvious questions about training standards and equipment quality, the incident raises deeper questions about the PLA’s internal accountability and oversight of China’s defence industry – which has long been plagued by corruption,” he said. “It’s not surprising that the PLA navy would try to conceal.”

A Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington said they had no information to provide. “We are not familiar with the situation you mentioned and currently have no information to provide,” the official told Reuters.

As of 2022, China had six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, six nuclear-powered attack submarines and 48 diesel-powered attack submarines, according to a Pentagon report on China’s military. That submarine force is expected to grow to 65 by 2025 and 80 by 2035, the US defence department has said.

The Pentagon report said the goal of developing the new submarines, along with surface ships and naval aircraft, is to counteract US moves to come to Taiwan’s aid in a conflict and establish “maritime superiority” in a string of islands stretching from the Japanese archipelago to the South China Sea.

“The sinking of a new nuclear sub that was produced at a new yard will slow China’s plans to grow its nuclear submarine fleet,” Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation thinktank, told the Journal. “This is significant.”

The voting machine company Smartmatic and the conservative outlet Newsmax have settled a closely watched defamation lawsuit days before it was set to go to trial in Delaware.

A spokesman for the Delaware courts said the case had been settled on Thursday. He did not offer additional details. The trial was set to begin in Wilmington on Monday.

The terms of the settlement are not public.

“Newsmax is pleased to announce it has resolved the litigation brought by Smartmatic through a confidential settlement,” Bill Daddi, a spokesman for the network, said in a statement.

After the 2020 election, Newsmax aired several false claims about the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. The network repeatedly aired false claims from Trump allies that the software was widely used across the country and that it had been hacked to change votes.

Smartmatic sued Newsmax, Fox, One America News Network (OANN) and others for broadcasting their false claims. It settled the case with OANN earlier this year and the Fox case is still pending in New York.

Smartmatic said in a statement: “We are very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax. We are now looking forward to our court day against Fox Corp and Fox News for their disinformation campaign. Lying to the American people has consequences. Smartmatic will not stop until the perpetrators are held accountable.”

First amendment scholars were closely watching the case and several others like it to see whether libel law can be used as an effective tool to police misinformation.

The case was set to be a kind of sequel to the defamation litigation between Dominion, another voting machine company, and Fox over 2020 election lies. That case was settled just before the trial was set to begin, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion $787.5m. Eric Davis, the judge who oversaw the Fox case, was also overseeing the Newsmax case.

A settlement was not surprising in the case as trial neared. Davis ruled that Smartmatic could not seek punitive damages, a decision that significantly limited any possible financial payout for Smartmatic.

Davis had also ruled that Newsmax could use the “neutral report privilege” as a defense in the case – a legal shield that allows media outlets to broadcast allegations if they are reporting on a newsworthy event and do so in a disinterested and neutral way. Davis had not let Fox used that defense in its litigation.

Smartmatic executives were indicted by the justice department earlier this year on bribery charges in the Philippines. Even though the charges were completely unrelated to the 2020 election, it offered an opportunity for Newsmax lawyers to argue that the company’s poor reputation could not be attributed to what was said on its air.

But Newsmax also had reasons to settle. In a pre-trial conference, a lawyer for the company had called it a “bet-your-company” case for the outlet. Newsmax, which is projecting $180.5m in revenue this year, saw a surge in audience under the Trump administration and a bump that caught Fox’s attention after the 2020 election as it broadcast false claims about voting.

“The Newsmax surge is a bit troubling – truly is an alternative universe when you watch, but it can’t be ignored,” Jay Wallace, a Fox executive, wrote in an email to a colleague after the 2020 election.

Unlike in the Fox and Dominion litigation, only a few details emerged in the case revealing internal discussions at Newsmax as they broadcast false claims about the election. One of the messages was an internal letter from Christopher Ruddy, the network’s CEO from November 2020, conceding the network did not have evidence of voter fraud.

“Newsmax does not have evidence of widespread voter fraud. We have no evidence of a voter fraud conspiracy nor do we make such claims on Newsmax,” he wrote on 12 November 2020. “We have reported on significant evidence of widespread election irregularities and vote fraud. We will continue to report on that. We believe we should not censor allegations made by the President or his lawyers or surrogates. Our job is not to filter the news but report information and allow Americans to decide.”

Another exchange included Bob Sellers, a Newsmax host, and a producer, wondering how long they would have to air false claims about the election. “How long are we going to have to play along with election fraud?” Sellers wrote on 9 November 2020. “Trump’s MO is always to play victim [] And answer this question. Is there anything at all that could result in another election? The answer is no. and are there enough votes that could be switched or thrown out from fraud or irregularities? No.”

The lack of a trial may rob the public of the chance to hear about the state of mind of people who were behind broadcasting election lies, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah who has closely followed the defamation cases filed by those harmed by 2020 election lies.

Still, she noted that Davis had already ruled that the statements at issue in the case were false, and cautioned against expecting defamation cases to be a cure for misinformation.

“Defamation law can declare something a lie, but the question of whether a lie was told is only one of many questions that have to be asked and answered,” she said in an interview earlier this week. “It is a notoriously complex area of law, which means cases can be won or lost on a lot of grounds that have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the statement. And I am not sure that translates well to public discussion.”

Lyrissa Lidsky, a media law professor at the University of Florida, also cautioned against expecting libel law to be a cure-all for disinformation.

“Defamation law is not a panacea for election misinformation. There’s just no two ways about it,” she said. “It’s just a small piece.”

A woman believed to have killed herself and her eight-year-old disabled child in Salford was a desperately struggling mother who was failed by the authorities and was “not a monster”, a close friend has said.

The bodies of Martina Karos, 40, and Eleni Edwards were discovered on Monday morning after emergency services were called over a concern for their welfare. Police have said they are investigating the deaths but are not looking for anyone else and there was “no wider threat in the community”.

Karos was described by her friends as a “really kind, bubbly, nice person” and a “loving and devoted mother”, who was the sole carer for her daughter Eleni, affectionately known as “Laney”, who had cerebral palsy.

Speaking to the Guardian, her close friend said Karos had struggled with her mental health and a lack of adequate support with her daughter, who he felt was failed by social services.

After meeting Karos on the dating website Plenty of Fish in April, he said he had introduced her to his parents and that his children had spent time with her, and he had also helped her look after Eleni, who needed round-the-clock care.

“Martina was only about five foot tall,” he said. “Laney was eight years old with full-limb cerebral palsy, non-verbal and literally as tall as her. I carried her from her car seat to her wheelchair and she wasn’t dead heavy but it was enough where I said to Martina: ‘Wow, you’re as strong as an ant.’”

However, she was struggling with Eleni’s care, her friend said, with neighbours describing her as being very tired. After her death, friends and neighbours questioned why authorities had failed to notice how much she was struggling.

Her friend said: “It wasn’t just the taking care of her, it was the fact that when she was alone in the house – it was just her and Laney and she was non-verbal – she was just lonely every night and she had nobody.”

Having grown up in Italy, Karos spoke five languages and had a master’s degree in vocal linguistics, he said. She was a qualified translator in Italian, French, Spanish and English. “She was really bright.”

Laney’s father was not in the picture, having wanted “nothing to do with her when he found out she was disabled, that’s what Martina told me”. Karos had a “fractious” relationship with her mother, who was in Italy when Karos died.

The friend said Karos had talked to him about suicide “dozens of times”, but he would try to talk her out of it, having made a serious attempt himself not too long before, spending five days recovering in hospital.

He had urged her to seek mental health treatment but she told him she had been to her GP and tried antidepressants and they had not worked. She was feeling “hopeless”, she told him.

“I just keep thinking about certain situations where I could have said or done something different,” he said. “She never mentioned once she was going to take Laney with her because then I would have been notifying social services.”

But he realised now that she had spoken in coded language, telling him: “If I go, I won’t leave anything I love behind.”

He said: “That’s the reason she took Laney with her. She loved Laney more than anything. And even though it’s not right what she did, people need to understand that it happens when people are under that much pressure and don’t get the help that they need.

“I just want people to understand that Martina was a great person and just got stuck in a terrible place.”

Salford council did not respond to a request for comment but told the Manchester Evening News: “There were a range of support services being provided to both Eleni and Martina. At this time our staff are now continuing to support the wider community.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

A crew of refuse workers in north London narrowly escaped injury when combustible items that had been packed into a bin exploded after being loaded into a refuse truck.

Footage shows the moment of the explosion, caused after combustible items such as batteries, aerosol or gas canisters were wrongly placed into a residential bin.

They were then crushed by the lorry’s impactor, causing a bin and other debris to be fired out into the street. It follows another incident this year where a set of lithium batteries caught light and burned a hole in the side of a bin lorry.

Alan Schneiderman, a councillor in Barnet, said: “The video is incredibly shocking, and we’re relieved that the crew members escaped unharmed. I hope this helps people to understand how important it is to properly recycle items such as gas canisters and bottles, batteries and aerosols, as on another day we might not have been so lucky.”

The council said combustible waste should never be placed in waste bins and should be taken to a local recycling centre. In some cases they can be reused and refilled or returned to the seller for future use.

Battery fires in bin lorries and at waste sites in the UK have reached an all time high, the National Fire Chiefs Council said this year, adding that they were a disaster waiting to happen.

More than 1,200 such fires were recorded in the year to May, an an increase of 71% from 700 in 2022.

When crushed or damaged, batteries can be dangerous to the public, waste operators and firefighters as they cause fires that are especially challenging to tackle. They can create their own oxygen, which means they can keep reigniting, prolonging the fire.

Donald Trump’s mass voter turnout program in crucial battleground states is now principally being run by America Pac, the political action committee backed by the billionaire Elon Musk, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

The Trump campaign gambled with its general field operation for the 2024 cycle and outsourced it to Super Pacs, while it targeted its focus on turning out Trump supporters in rural areas who typically do not vote.

But while the Trump campaign once predicted having multiple Pacs drive the rest of the vote, with six weeks until the election, only America Pac has a material presence of 300 to 400 paid and part-time people knocking on doors in each of the seven battleground states.

America Pac also remains the only entity – Trump campaign or otherwise – with a target to do three “passes” of homes of likely Trump voters in every battleground state before election day.

Turning Point Action, run by the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk and touted by the Trump campaign, for instance, has a smaller footprint; it has a presence in Arizona and Wisconsin after dropping Georgia from its initial list.

The situation means America Pac now accounts for an outsize proportion of the unglamorous but critical work of door-knocking and canvassing Trump voters in battleground states to get them to return a ballot.

Since the Trump campaign does not have its own mass field program – it has a new model of “Trump 47 Captains”, volunteers targeting likely Trump supporters who do not typically vote – the campaign has little backup if America Pac hits snags.

Last week, America Pac fired the company it had retained in Arizona and Nevada to do door-knocking and canvassing.

The move to terminate the September Group had damaging consequences for Trump as America Pac lost several days of canvassing while they sought a replacement company, and lost at least some of the roughly 300 people they hired in each state.

The Trump campaign denied that it had a reliance on America Pac and said it had more than 27,000 volunteers working as Trump 47 Captains, the program in which ardent Trump supporters receive special Maga merchandise as they get more people to register to vote.

Each volunteer initially receives a list of 10 neighbors to mobilize. If they meet that target, the next tier involves canvassing 24 out of 50 likely Trump voters, followed by canvassing 45 out of 100 voters, with new perks at each tier.

“Team Trump has hundreds of staff and offices mobilizing hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country. That’s why everyone wants to take credit for our groundbreaking, data-enhanced, people-powered operation,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokesperson, said in a statement.

But a person involved with America Pac expressed skepticism about the reach of the Trump 47 captains and noted targeting just so-called low propensity voters in rural areas is no substitute for hitting doors in suburban areas and cities as well.

Separately, if Trump wins, it could be in part thanks to Musk, who has articulated wider political ambitions – he recently pitched to Trump to serve in his cabinet in a second term – and resultantly have outsized influence with Trump.

The America Pac operation was slow to get started after it scrapped its initial plans, and only started hiring employees at a rapid clip last month.

But it has since exploded in size. By retaining canvassing vendors for each battleground state, America Pac’s operation now involves hundreds of paid and part-time employees to knock on doors in an unusually aggressive get-out-the-vote effort, the person said.

In North Carolina and Michigan, America Pac’s vendor, Blitz Canvassing LLC, has hired more than 400 staffers in each state, the person said. America Pac has paid roughly $3.3m to Blitz to date, according to federal campaign finance filings.

Blitz is now also responsible for Arizona and Nevada after it was named as the successor to the September Group. It has a mandate to rehire as many of the fired 300 canvassers as possible, and in Nevada, to hit roughly 30,000 doors a day.

The retention of Blitz has been controversial inside Trump world, in part because Blitz is a subsidiary of a company called GP3 owned by the political consultants running America Pac. It has given rise to accusations that America Pac’s leadership is profiting twice.

For Pennsylvania and Georgia, America Pac has subcontracted to Patriot Grassroots LLC and paid about $2.3m to date. For Wisconsin, America Pac has subcontracted to the Synapse Group for about $468,000, according to campaign finance filings.

The model Naomi Campbell has been banned from being a charity trustee after a watchdog investigation uncovered widespread evidence of financial misconduct at the poverty relief charity she fronted for more than a decade.

Campbell was disqualified for five years after a Charity Commission inquiry found Fashion For Relief passed on only a tiny fraction of the millions it raised from star-studded celebrity fashion events to good causes.

The charity spent tens of thousands of pounds on luxury hotel rooms, spa treatments, cigarettes and personal security for Campbell, while unauthorised payments running into hundreds of thousands were made to one of Campbell’s fellow trustees, the commission said.

Nearly £350,000 was recovered by investigators from the charity and paid to Save the Children and the Mayor’s Fund for London, which reported Fashion For Relief to the regulators four years ago after fundraising partnerships went sour.

Campbell’s fellow trustee Bianka Hellmich, who the inquiry found received £290,000 in unauthorised consultancy and expenses payments from the charity over a two-year period was disqualified from being a charity trustee for nine years. A third trustee, Veronica Chou, was banned for four years.

The inquiry report uncovered a history of shambolic financial management and chaotic record-keeping at the charity, which was finally wound up in March.

The Charity Commission’s assistant director for specialist investigations and standards, Tim Hopkins, said: “Trustees are legally required to make decisions that are in their charity’s best interests and to comply with their legal duties and responsibilities. Our inquiry has found that the trustees of this charity failed to do so, which has resulted in our action to disqualify them.

“This inquiry, and the work of the interim managers we appointed to run the charity in place of the trustees, has resulted in the recovery of £344,000 and protection of a further £98,000 charitable funds. I am pleased that the inquiry has seen donations made to other charities which this charity has previously supported.”

Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally belong in the tropics.

Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of semidetached homes.

If that sounds unnatural, it is. This weather does not belong in the safe, predictable, home counties of England. At least, not in a normal state of affairs.

But ever-greater combustion of fossil fuels has turned the world’s climate on its head. In the past week, the northern latitudes are behaving like the equatorial margins.

The leafy suburb of Woburn in Bedfordshire, for example, was drenched in a sky dump of more than 100mm (3.9in) of rain on Sunday, a month’s worth of rain in a day. That’s a downpour worthy of the height of the rainy season in my Amazonian home of Altamira, where I have lived for the past three years.

It felt similar too – thick dark clouds, brief intense bursts, drainage systems instantly overloaded – as I walked home on Monday evening through the avenues of Barnet. This weather doesn’t belong here, I thought.

Yet nowhere can rely on familiar patterns of rain or shine any more. That is also true of the Brazilian rainforest, which is alarmingly starved of precipitation.

Stretches of the Amazon River have dried up in the midst of a protracted drought over the past year or more. Desiccated vegetation has created tinder-like conditions. Neighbours back home send me messages warning of fires that creep closer to our community. It is a similar story in the Pantanal region, the world’s largest tropical wetland, and in the Cerrado savanna. Last week, more than 60% of Brazil was enveloped in smoke.

The messed-up mess we call a climate becomes more deadly every day in ever-wider swathes of the world. In the past week, floods have killed at least 384 people in Myanmar, 21 in central Europe, 10 in Morocco and six in Japan.

Social media timelines are filled with anomalous mobile phone photographs of torrents of water flowing in all the wrong places: the Sahara in north Africa, the streets of Cannes in the French Riviera, and through road tunnels under railway bridges in Slough, England.

The latter brought to mind the opening lines of John Betjeman’s 1937 poem, Slough, which decried the unthinkingly grim expansion of industrial parks, air conditioning and labour-saving homes in the run-up to the second world war:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

We now live in a different time with a different threat. But there is the same sense that industrial society is inviting its own destruction.

The climate “bombs” that rain down on today’s world are less targeted but far more explosive. Since 1971, scientists say human-caused global heating has trapped the equivalent of 380 zettajoules of energy in the Earth system, which is 25bn times the power of the “Little Boy” atomic weapon that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. This accumulation of energy, which causes more intense storms, heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts, continues to mushroom because carbon emissions continue to rise.

The impacts have long been felt in places such as Altamira and elsewhere in the global south, which are less responsible for this manufactured calamity but more vulnerable to its effects. Now, after two years of record global heat, even the wealthier, guiltier parts of the world are no longer protected by concrete walls and air-conditioned environments.

Suburban floods, floating Ford Fiestas, cancelled football games and other disruptions to humdrum routines are only just beginning for the middle-class in rich countries.

Will it make a difference to public opinion and government policy? I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet on it. What is aberrant today may once again be normalised a year or two from now, further postponing the eradication of fossil fuels and forest burning, further turning the world upside down, further widening the gap between the global north and south, and making it ever stranger and more difficult for everyone to come home.

With its impressive size, striking plumage and rowdy displays, sighting a capercaillie is many birders’ dream. Only about 530 of the large woodland grouse survive in the wild, most in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park.

But in recent years, those tasked with saving the species from extinction have had to walk a line between calling attention to the birds’ plight and discouraging people from seeking them out.

Although it is illegal to disturb capercaillie during the breeding season from March to August, that hasn’t deterred birders and nature photographers, motivated by the possibility of a prestigious spot – or shot. Over the 2022 season, 17 people were found on or around the “lek”, where male birds gather to compete for the attention of females in spring, says Carolyn Robertson, the project manager of the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project.

That same year, a birdwatcher was caught on camera, flushing six capercaillie from the breeding site. The man was arrested, but let go with a verbal warning. By then the damage may have already been done.

Even fleeting disruption can “make the difference between birds breeding, or not,” says Robertson. “We know that it increases their stress levels, so there’s a high chance they didn’t come back to the area to breed that morning; they might not have returned for days.”

With so few birds remaining in the wild, human disturbance could be “catastrophic” for the species, Robertson says – but discouraging nature enthusiasts from seeking them out has proved challenging. “When people have taken photographs of capercaillie and put them online, they’ve been liked thousands of times. By the time we ask them to take them down, it’s got them so much kudos, they don’t want to do so.”

It reflects a new and increasing threat to vulnerable species and habitats around the world: social media. A new paper in the Science of The Total Environment journal has highlighted the negative impacts of online posting and photography on biodiversity.

By calling attention to rare flora and fauna – and in some cases their precise locations – nature enthusiasts posting about finds can cause others to flock to the same location, and even to deploy unethical tactics (such as playing back bird calls or using bait) to secure a sighting for themselves.

Robert Davis, a senior lecturer in wildlife ecology at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and the paper’s lead author, says the research was “driven by collective rage” at having seen pristine natural spots and vulnerable species negatively affected by visitors.

“There’s actually probably never been a time in human history where you can share information so rapidly to so many people, and with that has come this immense pressure to systems,” he says.

Populations of the critically endangered blue-crowned laughingthrush, restricted to a small area of Jiangxi province in China, are believed to have changed their nesting habits in response to “severe” disturbance from wildlife photographers.

In 2022, packs of photographers turned up in Shetland, seeking a sight of the elusive lanceolated warbler, potentially causing the bird to abandon the area. This August, a photographer was fined more than £1,600 for disturbing a nesting European honey buzzard in Wales.

In Perth, where Davis lives with his wife, Belinda, a biologist and co-author of the paper, online attention has proved especially problematic for the state’s endemic orchids. “You can track it on social media, more and more pictures being put up of the same plant,” he says.

Sometimes, one post about a flowering orchid can result in hundreds of visitors to the site, Davis says, putting the plants at risk of being damaged or poached.

The eastern Queen of Sheba orchid, which can take 10 years to bloom and is found only in a small area of south-west Western Australia, is such a desirable find for orchid hunters that plants in the wild have had to be put under protection.

“They’ve had to fence that orchid, put cameras on it and have guardians for it,” says Davis. “That really exemplifies the extreme end.”

But asking people not to seek out and post about vulnerable species is often met with resistance, says Davis. “You get a lot of pushback from people saying: ‘Why are you the gatekeeper? Everyone has a right to see this – what’s the harm in just one person?’.”

“When something’s that rare, you could single-handedly push it to extinction.”

He acknowledges that the impact on vulnerable species is minor relative to the broader threats posed by habitat loss and invasive species. But social media perpetuates the problem, Davis says. “Ultimately, it fuels demand: the rarer something is, the more people want to see it.”

It highlights a mounting conflict between conservation aims, and those invested in seeing a species before it’s too late.

James Lowen, a natural history writer based in Norfolk, says standards among nature enthusiasts have been slipping, perhaps reflecting the ease of taking and sharing photographs online.

“There are now more people whose hobby is wildlife photography, rather than wildlife watching, and I suspect that they have not been brought up with the same attention to ethics and fieldcraft.”

That threat is having to be actively managed now, among countless others. The recent rediscoveries of the Norfolk snout moth, believed to be extinct, and the ghost orchid, not seen since 2009, generated much excitement from enthusiasts – but their precise locations have had to be obscured, for fear of further disadvantaging the species, says Lowen.

“It’s a really tight balance to walk: social media is great for drawing people’s attention, but there needs to be a level of discretion.”

Lowen himself removed capercaillie from the most recent edition of his book, 52 Wild Weekends, to reflect the impact of human disturbance on their breeding success. “We all want to see capercaillie, and to see them display – they are remarkable creatures … but absolutely, birders should stay away.”

The Cairngorms Capercaillie Project, meanwhile, has sought to harness the power of social media to save the species. Last year, it launched the “Lek It Be” campaign, urging people not to go looking for the bird or to post photographs online.

Robertson says it has already had a positive effect, with 55% fewer birders, photographers and guided groups observed around lek sites this season.

While the bird-watching community has backed the campaign, photographers have been less responsive, Robertson says – perhaps reflecting their different motivations. “Birders will talk about it, and tick a list … but [photographers] need that output, the shot – that’s what they’re there for,” she says.

Now the worst offenders may find themselves on the other end of the lens. Last year, the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project posted a video of two men caught looking for capercaillie on the lek, to discourage others from doing the same. The intent wasn’t to publicly shame them, Robertson says. “It’s about developing a social norm. We just don’t look for capercaillie any more – we leave them in peace.”

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