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.
Tropical forests destroyed at fastest recorded rate in 2024
The world's tropical forests, which provide a crucial buffer against climate change, disappeared faster than ever recorded last year, new satellite analysis suggests.
Researchers estimate that 67,000 sq km (26,000 sq mi) of these pristine, old-growth forests were lost in 2024 – an area nearly as large as the Republic of Ireland, or 18 football pitches a minute.
Global Ice Melt to Destroy World's Coastlines - 2025
The world’s ice sheets just got a dire prognosis, and coastlines are going to pay the price
Glaciers in Antarctica on February 7, 2022. A new study suggests even if the world meets its climate targets it may not be enough to save the planet's ice sheets.
The world’s ice sheets are on course for runaway melting, leading to multiple feet of sea level rise and “catastrophic” migration away from coastlines, even if the world pulls off the miraculous and keeps global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to new research.
A group of international scientists set out to establish what a “safe limit” of warming would be for the survival of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. They pored over studies that took data from satellites, climate models and evidence from the past, from things like ice cores, deep-sea sediments and even octopus DNA.
Celtic rainforest facing species extinction crisis - 2025
Temperate rainforest, seen here in the Vale of Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, is found in areas subject to the influence of the sea
An "extinction crisis" is happening in Britain's temperate rainforests where some of the world's rarest mosses, lichens and liverworts are vanishing, ecologists have warned.
Also known as Celtic rainforests, temperate rainforests are found primarily along the UK's western coasts.
The photo of Jane Goodall with infant chimp Flint challenged scientific norms and changed our view of the animal kingdom
In 1964, Jane Goodall's husband Hugo van Lawick took a photo of her and an infant chimp reaching out to each other. Decades later, it continues to impact how we view chimpanzees.
Last male of his kind: The rhino that became a conservation icon
Tony Karumba's photo of Sudan with his carer made the rhino a global sensation in his final year
Sudan, the world's last male northern white rhino, died in 2018. In his final years, he became a global celebrity and conservation icon, helping raise awareness about the brutality of poaching.
When hungry elephants and people clash in a village
When hungry elephants and people clash in a village - human overpopulation and overdevelopment = destruction and loss of habitat which drives species to extinction.
An elephant eyes the Elephant Response Team's vehicle as the team attempt to drive the animal away from the town of Livingstone in Zambia and back toward Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park.
The emergency call comes in just before midnight. In the driver's seat of a battered Toyota Hilux pickup truck, 29-year-old Chamunolwa Jimayi chats briefly with the caller. He hangs up the phone and shouts to his two colleagues in the back to hold on tight, then shoots off at high speed through the city center, careening around the traffic.
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.
Some misguided people, today, who may call themselves "pronatalist", and who look at future predictions of negative population growth (meaning that population will decrease in the future, instead of continuing to increase), and see this as a problem, are wrong or are not thinking clearly. Some of them may believe that African and Arab and Asian populations are in the process of "replacing" or at least are overtaking the Caucasian, European-based ethnicities that have traditionally been the majority of the population in countries like the US, the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and they are right - this is indeed happening, as is the Hispanicization of the US population because of such massive immigration. And they are right to be concerned about this. In a century there may be no nations left on Earth where Caucasians of European ancestry are the majority of the population if immigration is not stopped. And this is a problem. There will be African majority countries, Asian majority countries, Arab majority countries, Hispanic majority countries, but there will not be any Caucasian of European ancestry majority countries left if we do not take action now.
Recent comments