Intense Mediterranean Sea heatwave raises fears for marine life - July 2025
Warmer water at the seaside might sound nice for your holiday dip, but recent ocean heat in the Mediterranean Sea has been so intense that scientists fear potentially devastating consequences for marine life.
The temperature of the sea surface regularly passed 30C off the coast of Majorca and elsewhere in late June and early July, in places six or seven degrees above usual.
That's probably warmer than your local leisure centre swimming pool.
It has been the western Med's most extreme marine heatwave ever recorded for the time of year, affecting large areas of the sea for weeks on end.
The heat appears to be cooling off, but some species simply struggle to cope with such prolonged and intense warmth, with potential knock-on effects for fish stocks.
To give you some idea of these temperatures, most leisure centre swimming pools are heated to roughly 28C. Competitive swimming pools are slightly cooler at 25-28C, World Aquatics says.
Children's pools are a bit warmer, recommended at 29-31C or 30-32C for babies, according to the Swimming Teachers' Association.
Such balmy temperatures might sound attractive, but they can pose hidden threats. Harmful bacteria and algae can often spread more easily in warmer seawater, which isn't treated with cleaning chemicals like your local pool.
Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, leading scientists warn - 2025
The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions.
That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming.
Nearly 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above levels of the late 1800s in a landmark agreement in 2015, with the aim of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change.
But countries have continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas and chop down carbon-rich forests - leaving that international goal in peril.
"Things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds.
"We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well."
These changes "have been predicted for some time and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions", he added.
US Reverses Course under Trump and other Countries follow suit, threatening the Planet - 2025
How Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' pledge is affecting other countries
Trump has said the US's oil and gas will be sold all over the world
The UN climate summit in the United Arab Emirates in 2023 ended with a call to "transition away from fossil fuels". It was applauded as a historic milestone in global climate action.
Trees are carbon and methane sinks - we need billions more trees!
Trees might not be acting in the way we thought - this forest fitted with pipes can tell us why
By simulating the future atmosphere, scientists hope to understand whether trees will continue to act as the lungs of the planet.
"The oak is the queen of her domain," says Rob MacKenzie as he gestures towards a giant towering above us. This oak tree has stood in this very spot since long before he or I walked the Earth.
Today, In 2023, Humanity is facing a catastrophic human-induced climate crisis which seriously threatens our very survival.
Fundamentally, Humanity is faced with this climate crisis for a few principal reasons, which are important to understand in order to advocate the best solutions.
Pollution (including that of overpopulated species, which can be seen from the point of view of Earth as a form of toxic pollution) does not recognize national boundaries and borders while Earth is subdivided politically into self-regulating nation-states, which regulate, or fail to regulate, pollution and population for their own people and territories.
Methane accounts for more than one-quarter of the anthropogenic radiative imbalance since the pre-industrial age. Its largest sources include both natural and human-mediated pathways: wetlands, fossil fuels (oil/gas and coal), agriculture (livestock and rice cultivation), landfills, and fires. The dominant loss of methane is through oxidation in the atmosphere via the hydroxyl radical (OH). Apart from its radiative effects, methane impacts background tropospheric ozone levels, the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere, and stratospheric water vapor. As such, changes in the abundance of atmospheric methane can have profound impacts on the future state of our climate.
A British aid charity is warning that by 2060 more than a billion people worldwide will live in cities at risk of catastrophic flooding as a result of climate change. A study by Christian Aid says the US, China and India are among the countries most threatened. It says the Indian cities of Kolkata and Mumbai will be most at risk. The eight most vulnerable cities on the list are all in Asia, followed by Miami in the US. The report urges governments to take action to reduce global warming and invest in disaster reduction programmes. Dr Alison Doig, the report's author, told the BBC World Service that people living in large coastal cities were particularly at risk. "I think it's cities like Kolkata, Dakar, the big mega-cities of the south and the emerging economies where the people are most vulnerable to exposure to sea-level rises and to higher rain events," she said. "Flooding in these cities can cause massive damage, but can also threaten life." Dr Doig warned that Florida was likely to suffer extensive flooding. "The whole of Florida is totally vulnerable," she said. "It is so low-lying, it is virtually swampland reclaimed. So significant climate change... raising water half to a full metre this century, will take out an awful lot of Florida and a significant amount of Miami." The study says that the priority should be to rapidly reduce carbon emissions and limit temperature increase by switching from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy.
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