Disposable barbecue caused large Croft Hill grassland fire
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Bryson DeChambeau reveals his masterplan to tame the elements at The Open - as he sheds light on little-known 'personal project'
Bryson DeChambeau has travelled through several incarnations in recent years: President Trump's best buddy, Rory McIlroy 's worst enemy, the king of TikTok and the apostate of LIV Golf. But as he sheltered from the elements at Royal Portrush on Tuesday and talked about the challenges that will be set by the Open, which begins here on Thursday, he went back to his roots. He became the Mad Scientist again. DeChambeau, ranked 15th in the world, talked about the wind that blows in off the North Atlantic here and started getting carried away with his enthusiasm for the subject. It was like listening to Dennis Hopper's photojournalist in Apocalypse Now. 'This is dialectics,' Hopper's character says. 'It's very simple dialectics. One through nine. No maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space. You can't go out into space, you know, without like, you know, with fractions. What are you gonna land on?' DeChambeau, the most famous physics student to come out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was short of that level of crazy as he turned his press conference into a lecture on the elements but then, as he once said: 'Crazy is a relative term, you know.' By the time he had gone out on to the course for a practice round on Tuesday, spectators were huddled beneath umbrellas and something approaching a gale was blowing in off the ocean but DeChambeau, who is a diligent data analyst, attacked the subject as if it were an equation to be solved. 'When you're here,' he said, 'you're feeling the wind, how much it's coming into you and if it's off the left or right a lot more than normal. OK, how do I feel? How do I turn this into the wind? 'If you're going to try to ride the wind one time, how do I control it and make sure it doesn't go into a crazy place? Because once the ball goes into that wind, it's sayonara. That thing can go forever offline. It will turn east sometimes. 'We're doing some testing right now, going to continue to work on how different types of wind affect the golf balls. It's something I'm working on as a personal project, and it's going to take time to understand it. 'This is going to sound wild, but imagine a scenario where you've got a 400-yard tent, and you can just hit any type of shot with any wind with all the fans. Wouldn't it be cool to test in a massive wind tunnel? I'd love that. That's what I imagine, like in a hangar or something like that in a big stadium. 'But all I've really done is hit more half shots and try to play into the wind a lot more. If it's a left-to-right wind, I'll draw it. If it's a right-to-left wind, I'll try to cut it more often than not. If I try to play with the wind, sometimes I lose control of the golf ball. Whenever I had a right-to-left wind and I was trying to hit draws, man, that thing would go forever offline.' Perhaps DeChambeau's obsession with the wind here stems from the fact that the best finish he has ever achieved at the Open is tied for eighth in 2022, when the tournament was held at St Andrews. He has won a second US Open since then, taking advantage of a barrage of late mistakes by McIlroy to seal a famous victory at Pinehurst last year. McIlroy got his revenge at Augusta in April when he faced down DeChambeau in the final group on Sunday to win his first Green Jacket. Much was made of the fact that McIlroy did not speak to his playing partner for the entire round. McIlroy may have missed the cut the last time the Open was played here but many see him as the man to beat this year and the idea of joining battle with the Northern Irishman again appeals to DeChambeau. 'I would love that,' said DeChambeau recently. 'I would love nothing more than that. I'd love to beat him, especially in front of his hometown crowd. It'd be great.' First of all, though, there's that other enemy to conquer: the wind. Because you can't land on fractions.
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Extreme weather 'becoming the norm' - as minister warns UK's way of life 'under threat'
Britain's climate is changing rapidly, with records regularly being smashed and extremes of heat and rainfall becoming the norm, the Met Office has warned. In an updated assessment of the UK's climate, the forecaster says heatwaves and periods of flood or drought are becoming more frequent and more intense. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband called the findings "a stark warning" to take action on climate and nature. "Our British way of life is under threat," Mr Miliband told the PA news agency. "Whether it is extreme heat, droughts, flooding, we can see it actually with our own eyes, that it's already happening, and we need to act." The report shows the period between October 2023 and March 2024 was the wettest winter period in England and Wales in over 250 years. Spring 2024 was also the warmest on record. It says the increasing extremes are "typical of recent years". Mike Kendon, a Met Office climate scientist and lead author of the State of the UK Climate report, said: "Every year that goes by is another upward step on the warming trajectory our climate is on. "Observations show that our climate in the UK is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago. "We are now seeing records being broken very frequently as we see temperature and rainfall extremes being the most affected by our changing climate." 2:17 The report compares the decade up to 2024 with long-term averages between 1961 and 1990. While the average temperature is increasing, the hottest summer days and coldest winter nights have warmed twice as fast. The climate is also becoming wetter - with the extra rain falling between October and March. Over the last decade, rainfall over the six-month winter period was 16% higher than the average between 1961 and 1990. Effects of UK climate change 'deeply concerning' Chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, Professor Liz Bentley, said the report "reinforces the clear and urgent signals of our changing climate". "While long-term averages are shifting, it is the extreme heat, intense rainfall and droughts that are having the most immediate and dramatic effects on people and nature," she said. "This report is not just a record of change, but a call to action." 0:46 Kathryn Brown, director of climate change at The Wildlife Trusts, said the effects of climate change on UK wildlife were already "deeply concerning". "From swifts dropping out of the sky during heatwaves to trees flowering much earlier than they have in the past," she said. "We are particularly worried about the effects of droughts on our nature reserves."
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
East and West Midlands are latest regions officially in drought - which areas could be next?
The East and West Midlands are officially in drought after the driest start to a year since 1976. The two regions join the North West of England and Yorkshire, which have had drought status for several weeks. The decision by the government's National Drought Group makes it more likely that people in the areas will be affected by hosepipe bans. Currently, eight million people have restrictions on water use, or will do so in the next week. Experts from the government, water companies and the Met Office judged that reservoir and river levels in the Midlands were well below normal, with no substantial rain in the forecast. But Howden reservoir in Derbyshire is just 39% full, with three heatwaves so far this summer rapidly draining supplies. 2:38 After the meeting by the government group, water minister Emma Hardy MP said: "We need to stop talking about these being extreme weather events and start to accept that because of climate change, things like this are going to be more normal. "So as for whether more companies will introduce temporary use bans, that really genuinely depends on what happens with the weather over the next few months." The Environment Agency has drawn up a reasonable worst-case scenario in which England receives 20% less rain than normal and the weather remains warm, but not hot - far from improbable. In that case, the drought will grow to include all regions down to Wessex, Hampshire and across to Cambridgeshire by the autumn. The rest of the country would be in a pre-drought status - officially called "prolonged dry weather" - apart from Devon and Cornwall, which have had more rain over recent months. 2:59 But a water expert has told Sky News that poor planning by the government and water companies is also to blame for regions being affected by drought and hosepipe bans. Professor Richard Ashley, of the University of Sheffield, said a failure to build new reservoirs, link up water grids across regions and fix leaks has undermined water security in the face of dry weather. "We do have a largely Victorian-based supply system," he said. "A lot of our infrastructure is in desperate need of upgrading, and replacement of water mains is of the order of once every hundred years in this country, and that frankly is shocking. "This is outdated thinking and outdated infrastructure to cope with problems of the now and the future." The last reservoir built in the UK was in 1992. Since then, the population has grown by 12 million. And water companies currently lose three billion litres of water a day through leaks. Even on the day that the official drought was expanded, a burst water main in south London resulted in a flood that closed schools and forced homes to be evacuated
