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Our environment correspondent Matthew Taylor travelled to an unforgettable region to witness the threat it faces

I have arrived in Punta Arenas on the southern tip of Chile after a 24-hour whistlestop tour of South American airports. Pleased to see my bags have made it too. I was asked to avoid packing synthetic and down clothing wherever possible because it could contaminate the environment, so was pleased all those carefully selected natural fibres had made it with me across the Atlantic. Luke, my press contact at Greenpeace, meets me, which is just as well as I don’t really speak Spanish. We get a taxi to the dock and I have my first view of the Arctic Sunrise – the Greenpeace ship last in the news when it was stormed by the Russian FSB in the Arctic. It is bustling with people fixing things, loading things, working and chatting. Everyone is friendly. I wonder about the different stories that bring them all here. Are they the kind of people who want to jump off the edge of the map, as Werner Herzog found in his documentary about the Antarctic? The ship is smaller than I’d imagined and more “workmanlike”. If I had ever been in any doubt, I now realise that the next two weeks, crossing some of the roughest water in the world to a place that is mostly uninhabitable, isn’t going to be a cruise.

Global shareholders file motion calling for rethink on membership of coal lobby groups

The voice of Australia’s coal lobby is under renewed threat as the country’s second biggest miner, Rio Tinto, faces a shareholder revolt over its membership of lobby groups including the Minerals Council of Australia and the role it plays in Australia’s climate and energy debate.

Global investors worth $84bn have joined together to file a shareholder motion calling on Rio Tinto to rethink its membership of the MCA, NSW Minerals Council (NSWMC) and the Queensland Resources Council (QRC). It demands Rio Tinto reveal all membership fees paid since 2012, review the consistency of the MCA’s lobbying positions with those held by Rio Tinto, and disclose what it would take for Rio to quit its membership of the MCA.

Related: Rio Tinto investors recruited to force mining giant to quit Minerals Council

Related: Minerals Council of Australia kicks off coal power campaign despite BHP ​threat

The weather is extremely worrying. It has never been so warm for so long at this time of year before and it is just possible that the effects will be catastrophic. We are talking, of course, about the Arctic, where over vast areas of frozen sea the temperatures are higher than they are in Britain today. A blast of winter in Britain and across much of northern Europe is unpleasant but perfectly survivable and affects few people outside the region, but a period of unseasonal warming in the Arctic could be the harbinger of something that changes the whole world for the worse. Both could be connected so that the cold winds that belong in the Arctic have broken out southwards to chill us while warm winds melt the ice cap. We don’t know, but that’s no reason for complacency.

Precisely because climate change on the scale now under way is outside all previous experience of which we have records, it’s impossible to know which unprecedented fluctuations are those that mark the transition to a new and more dangerous state. That determination can only be made long afterwards, when it is too late to change anything. It does not mean there is nothing to worry about; only that we can’t be certain what ought to worry us. This one probably should. The weather in the Arctic has always shifted dramatically over short periods, but the drama has never been this intense since records began. At one spot in Greenland the temperature rose 36C above the annual average, and for two days in February the north pole has been warmer than Zurich in Switzerland.

Tuition fees were meant to pit teachers and learners against each other. Instead, they have bound them together in solidarity

The most interesting thing in a damning report often doesn’t end up as its talking point. Damnation is so fun, it’s hard to prioritise. So when the Commissioner for Public Appointments looked into the selection criteria for the board of the Office for Students, all the fireworks focused on Toby Young. Pugnacious in the noughties but curiously sensitive this decade, upset by mere mention of the anal sex jokes that only a short time ago were his stock in trade, Young was the beneficiary of a process that we could have all hazarded a guess at, but now have on paper: Jo Johnson, the universities minister, told him to apply. Justine Greening’s objections were overruled. The other candidates were discounted by a process with “serious shortcomings in fairness and transparency”. As if by magic, the least-suited person was suddenly the best imaginable, like Ivanka Trump in South Korea, or Tom Hanks in Big.

Less was said about the panel’s decision on its choice of a student representative: in the selection process, it explicitly excluded anyone who had been involved with the National Union of Students. Nothing about this blacklist appeared in the advert for candidates, of course, because it would have made them look crazy; what kind of Office for Students discounts anyone who has shown an interest in the collective lot of students? Yet secret criteria aren’t a great look, either, signifying something in the region of bottomless distrust of the student body.