World temperatures are rising because of human activity, and climate change now threatens every aspect of human life.

Left unchecked, humans and nature will experience catastrophic warming, with worsening droughts, greater sea level rise and mass extinction of species.

We face a huge challenge, but there are potential solutions.

What is climate change?

Climate is the average weather in a place over many years. Climate change is a shift in those average conditions.

The July 2022 heatwave is happening when average world temperatures have risen by just over 1C from their pre-industrial levels.

We are living in the hottest period in 125,000 years, according to the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

We know what is behind this - greenhouse gas emissions caused by our burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas. Concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere are at the highest level for two million years and rising, according to the IPCC.

If all the promises governments made at the UN COP26 climate conference in Glasgow last year are actually implemented then we're looking at temperatures rising by 2.4C by the end of the century.

But the bad news is that emissions of CO2 continue to increase. Without big cuts by 2030 we could see temperatures go even higher. Perhaps as much as 4C by the end of the century, scientists predict.

Groups, Populations and Tribes of Humans are at risk of Extinction - and for the same major causes as animals: Human overpopulation, overdevelopment, pollution, global warming, and loss, decline and extinction of other species and habitat that Humans depend on for food, pollination, freshwater, rain and water purification, and temperature control.

The latest temperature numbers from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the first six months of 2016 were the hottest on record around the planet. Let's look at June. Scientists took temperatures from around the world and got a June average. What they found was a world that was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the average June in the 20th Century. How about January? Hottest ever. Same with February, March, April and May. Every month in 2016 has been warmer than ever, at least since people started keeping reliable records — that was 1880. How much warmer is 2016 so far? Overall, this year has been almost two degrees warmer than what people experienced in the 20th Century. Now, you may remember, last year broke the record for the hottest year ever globally. But Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that "2016 has really has blown that out of the water." Schmidt has calculated the chance that the rest of this year will continue on its record pace, based on the first six months. "It indicates that we have roughly a 99 percent chance of a new record in 2016," he says. About 70 percent of Earth is covered by clouds at any given moment. Their interaction with climate isn't easy to study, scientists say; these shape-shifters move quickly. A Warming World Means Less Water, With Economic Consequences. Now, a couple of degrees warmer overall may not sound like much; it changes more than that in a day.