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.
Climate change 2022: More studies needed on possibility of human extinction
Catastrophic climate change outcomes, including human extinction, are not being taken seriously enough by scientists, a new study says.
The authors say that the consequences of more extreme warming - still on the cards if no action is taken - are "dangerously underexplored".
They argue that the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of what they term the "climate endgame".
They want UN scientists to investigate the risk of catastrophic change. According to this new analysis, the closest attempts to directly understand or address how climate change could lead to global catastrophe have come from popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth and not from mainstream science research.
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.
2022 - We are living in the hottest period on earth in 125,000 years
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.
Arctic ice melt 'like adding 20 years of CO2 emissions'
The loss of Arctic ice is massively compounding the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, ice scientist Professor Peter Wadhams has told BBC Newsnight.
White ice reflects more sunlight than open water, acting like a parasol. Melting of white Arctic ice, currently at its lowest level in recent history, is causing more absorption. Prof Wadhams calculates this absorption of the sun's rays is having an effect "the equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man".
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