Record Heat, Wildfires and Drought - The Climate Crisis Is About To Accelerate

0:00And now a word from our sponsor South by Southwest London. Imagine a future where things just make sense. In the 1700s, we had canals. In the 1800s, the railways. Then telecom, fibre optic. And now? In a world that's more unsure than ever before, we need the answers. South by Southwest London presents over 900 speakers, 200 music artists, and 100 films in one location in June. To find out how they merge together and shape the future in person, visit southbysouthwestlondon.com. That's sxswlondon.com You know all the talk about keeping 1.5 degrees alive? Of course I do. This is the Paris climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

0:45Yeah, well so this year there's talk of temporarily getting to 2 degrees. 2 degrees! We haven't even officially agreed that we're at 1.5 yet. No, well so it's only a few climate models and it is just a blip to 2 degrees. But that's significant if we get there. Most show about 1.7 degrees of warming over pre-industrial temperatures this year. But yeah, some are showing too. A real flavour of what's to come. Often, when people talk about climate change, it can be easy to think that the worst effects are happening elsewhere. Rich nations are relatively, you know, they get an easier time of it. But a new report this week from the World Meteorological Organisation shows that temperatures in Europe have been rising by just over half a degree Celsius per decade since the mid-1990s.

1:30And that's faster than any other continent. Yeah, the hottest continent, but that's not a title we want. That's what we're getting into this episode of The World, the Universe and Ask for a New Scientist. I'm Dr. Owen Huber. And I'm Dr. Penny Sarchet. We're joined today by reporters Alec Loon and James Woodford. Hello, welcome. Hello, Penny. Hey, Rowan. Hey. So, Alec, you've been reporting on this European state of the climate report, the absolute state of the climate report and we're going to get into that but just to explain why James is here because one of the points that jumped out at me in the report is uh the sea temperature rise thing it's the the ocean around Europe is the the hottest for the fourth year in a row it's broken records as the fourth year running and there's so much to worry about sea temperature rise um and the thing we often talk about is the health of corals but James is here because he's been reporting on this finding of this group of islands where there's been extreme heat for a prolonged period but the corals have survived.

2:28Right so we're going to be talking about how awful things are but you've got a glimmer of hope for us at the end of the show. Just stay hang on for that. Great okay Alec last year was the hottest year on record for Iceland, Norway, the UK and then for Europe as a whole it was one of the three hottest years ever recorded. Take us through what this report says. Sure. And I just feel like climate scientists everywhere are squirming in their seats, if I won't say this caveat, which is that if temperatures do exceed two degrees Celsius this year, that'll just be for a month or two. That won't be the whole year going above two degrees Celsius.

3:04The Paris climate agreement is not dead. That's what I feel like climate scientists everywhere want me to say at this point. But it certainly is extremely concerning, even if global temperature goes above 2 degrees, even for a month or two. Yeah, I mean, we still haven't officially gone past 1.5. Yeah, because it needs to be a 20-year average. It needs to be a 20 - or 30-year average, as climate scientists say. But we're clearly heading in that direction. I was just saying it's a symbolically bad thing to reach to if we do reach to. Yeah, and projections are by the end of the century right now, we're on track for 2.7 degrees, something like that, of warming.

3:38So then you're looking at breaching too. But anyway, to get into what's going on in Europe, we saw this times two, basically, because Europe is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. That has to do with a bunch of different factors. A big factor is just that Europe is near the Arctic, and the Arctic is warming a lot because of Arctic amplification. Sea ice, snow goes away. That means there's less white surfaces reflecting sun back, and there's more blue ocean absorbing sun. So that's one reason why Europe's warming so fast, the fastest warming continent. And we saw 95 % of the continent saw above average annual temperatures in 2025.

4:24And a couple places saw really bad heat waves. There was a record-breaking heat wave in Phenoscandia, so Scandinavia plus kind of northeastern Russia and Finland. temperatures there were way above average for 21 days three weeks of a heat wave and up near the arctic circle temperatures reached about 30 degrees celsius almost unimaginable yeah and let's link that to the impacts right because we often just talk about these temperatures and it's easy to just think of them in the abstract but in the report we it does do a good job of showing that this extreme heat and what it's done for animal life, for plant growth, invasive species, pests?

5:11Yeah, so the report really tried to make that link between the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. These warming temperatures are driving these impacts on biodiversity, more invasive species, more pests, species having to shift north as their habitat becomes uninhabitable, right? This is what we're seeing in Phenoscandia with this heat wave and other places. The Mediterranean region was another really hard hit region. You know, so warming temperatures drive biodiversity loss, damage ecosystems, and that contributes to the biodiversity crisis we're seeing as well. And then with all the heat waves comes drought.

5:53And much of Europe experienced drought conditions, and that can contribute to wildfires as well. So it's kind of these cascading impacts from the rising temperatures. And last year was about a year for wildfires in Europe, wasn't it? Yeah, so we saw record wildfires in Spain and Portugal. The interesting thing about those were there it wasn't so much just the hot conditions. It was the kind of wild swings between weather that we're seeing more and more of. These extreme fluctuations in weather that we're seeing more and more of can really set the stage for extreme wildfires like we saw in Spain and Portugal.

6:35What happened there was they had a really wet spring. So vegetation went into overdrive, grew really quickly. And then when summer came around, they had record heat. And so that dried out all that vegetation. So you got a tinder box was how the scientists were describing it. And so this, what they call a high fuel load, all this dried out vegetation, excess vegetation that had grown, dries out, and then it's just fuel to burn. So more than 10 ,000 square kilometers were burned. Fires were approaching Madrid. They had to close down part of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Smoke drifted as far as the UK.

7:17And at least three people fighting the fires in Spain were killed. And across the continent, across Europe, I believe it was the highest ever wildfire emissions across Europe, right? So these huge wildfires drove these huge emissions. 47 million tons of carbon were emitted by these wildfires in just Europe. I think that's shocking to people because normally when we talk about wildfire emissions, we talk about Canada, Alaska, Russia, and also the tropics, places like Indonesia, Brazil. Yeah, we don't have that much stuff to burn. Exactly. So Europe is never in those conversations when we talk about huge emissions.

8:01Welcome to Australia. Australia as well, yeah. And so the fact that we're seeing major wildfire emissions from Europe, still not as much as the boreal forest or the tropical forest, but major wildfire emissions from Europe, that's kind of turning a new page. Okay, let's talk about oceans then. European sea temperatures in 2025 broke the record for temperature for the fourth year in a row. Yeah, it's just going in one direction and that's up. The extent was shocking as well. 86 % of the seas in Europe experienced heat waves. And the Mediterranean experienced 100%. 100 % of the Mediterranean was affected by heat waves.

8:42So it's just this incredible extent of the heat. There were some real hot spots west of Ireland, south of Iceland, and then southeast of Spain in the Mediterranean. But again, just everywhere is so hot. waters off of Italy and Spain were reaching 30 degrees Celsius. That's warmer than you would ever think about heating a swimming pool, too. And so, again, when we talk about the climate crisis driving the biodiversity crisis, temperatures like this can just have huge impacts on marine life, can raise the risk of mass die-offs of fish, can hinder fish from reproducing, and can lead to the spread of bacteria and algae blooms.

9:26And so we've seen past heat waves in the Mediterranean kill off coral, seagrass beds and shellfish. And we're still kind of taking stock of the effects of this heat wave, but we can probably expect much of the same. Let's bring in James here. James, we have basically called time on warm water corals. We're now at a point where things are so warm, they just can't survive. Or can they? Well, this was why this story was, or this paper was so surprising. What we had here was quite a famous but very remote Australian coral reef archipelago called the Hootman Abrolis Islands. And they're off the coast of Western Australia, off a town called Geraldton, about 80 kilometres offshore.

10:09And last year, as Alec was saying, this incredible marine heatwave hit that area. And we can see that from the NOAA satellite images. Everybody was thinking that the reef there would be toast because the more accessible reefs up at Ningaloo, further north, they were absolutely decimated by coral bleaching. But when the researchers got to these reefs in July, as the marine heat wave was starting to decline, they actually got in the water and discovered that there was zero bleaching, zero stress, no fluorescing corals. And it was a remarkable, remarkable thing. Can you take us through then simply how scientists do that?

10:58You said no fluorescing. How do they measure how stressed a coral is? How do you know? Well, it's a visual thing. So they basically can get in the water and they can assess the corals based on, for example, with bleaching. They're looking for the extent of white corals. They're looking for coral mortality. In the case of stress, one of the main indicators of coral stress is fluorescing. And I've dived in fluorescing coral reefs and they're incredibly beautiful. But it's a last call of distress. But in this case, they got in the water and everything, not just one species, but all the species, everything was in really tip-top health.

11:42How astonishing. It really is. So tell us about how they know that there wasn't some sort of shelter in this area, that the temperatures really did sustain a high level around these reefs. Yeah. So as I mentioned, they're able to see that from really fine-grained satellite images provided by NOAA. And they could actually watch the way that this marine heat wave unfolded. And the other thing I should say is that the way they measure this is that they don't go strictly on that water temperature was this high. They look at the accumulation of heat and the amount of time that the corals are exposed to that heat.

12:23So in early February, we're talking about what they describe as four degrees Celsius of weeks of temperature warming. And at that level, you would expect to start to see coral bleaching. Then within a month, it's up to double that, so eight degrees Celsius weeks. And that's when you'd expect to see not just bleaching, but mass mortality. then by April it had actually reached this insanely high record of 22 degrees Celsius weeks and at that level you know it would be you would expect that nothing would be left. It's a miracle. It's a miracle and also the really interesting part of the story is that they actually collected some corals from multiple species and they brought them back into the laboratory and they also got some corals from further north and they exposed the corals to this a range of temperatures and again the corals the the hootman abrolus islands corals they shrugged off the temperatures that the scientists were throwing at the these colonies in the laboratory but the ones from further north succumbed.

13:40So what they really want to look at now is trying to understand how this was possible. So what they think is the most likely is that because it's across a whole range of different coral species, that it must be something to do with the algal symbionts that live inside the coral and they also think that there must be something about the specific environment of the Hoopman-Abrollis Islands that over deep time these particular corals have been exposed to brutal conditions in the past and have a genetic memory that's enabled them to survive this. Wow. So Rowan obviously I'm turning to you, you're our symbiosis enthusiast and expert.

14:27Remind us again, coral is a super organism almost. Yeah, well, it's a composite organism. The shell of the skeleton of the coral is made by an animal, secreted by an animal. And the alga shelters in that animal, inside the house of the skeleton, and basically pays rent to the animal in the form of sugars that it makes from symbiosis. So, yeah, it's a symbiotic super organism, super successful, most spectacularly in the Great Barrier Reef going across this vast area. But the big deal is that this symbiosis breaks down. At high temperatures. Yeah, at 1.5, you know, it starts to break down. And then at two degrees of warming, it has had it.

15:14So it is absolutely remarkable. And as James says, this isn't just one species that's got through. It's multiple. So all the symbiosis are very specialised in different species. There's other organisms as well. There's bacteria that also take part, and it's not just two of them. There's other species in this sort of holobiont of this composite organism that is coral. So the way it survived is incredible. Well, and what is especially incredible is that this is incredible, not just on an Australian scale, but on a global scale. So they looked at also how corals had coped in places like the Gulf of Arabia.

15:55And they could not identify anywhere else where corals have survived in these kind of conditions. So it's a remarkable story. Could it lead to something that would help protect coral reefs around the world? Well, and this is an interesting angle to it. There was two main aspects that the researchers talked about in this paper. And the first is that this area needs now to have the highest level of protection possible. Because if you've got a reef that can survive, where elsewhere around the world reefs are dying, then we can't afford, for example, for fishing to go in and destroy it or for tourism to impact it.

16:39It now needs to be given the highest level of protection. And that's one of the first things that the scientists say. Because reefs, I mean, they're beautiful, but they also are like nurseries for marine life, right? They're incredibly important for all oceans, not just the local reef. And, you know, you don't want them to have survived this massive marine heat wave to then get destroyed by mining or fishing or tourism. So they want to be protected. And then the thing is to, is there a way that these corals, the genetics of these corals could be understood or corals from these reefs used to seed other areas, which is a very, very controversial.

17:22And a lot of researchers are very opposed to that. But it's something that the researchers and people who've seen the paper have talked about. I mean, it's controversial, isn't it, because of the scale it would be required. I think people think, oh, yeah, we could take these resistant corals and just seed the Great Barrier Reef. But to do that in any meaningful way would be an unbelievably massive task. And I think people think, well, it distracts from what you really need to do, which is get temperatures down and stop using fossil fuels. So that's basically why it's controversial. That's why it's controversial, because the moment you start doing that, then it is no longer a wild, a truly wild reef.

18:03It is it's it's gardening at that point. Also, just this remarkable resilience seems to have evolved as a result of this extraordinary location. Right. And it's amazing that it's done that. But we can't say for sure that you can just transplant it anywhere else and it will work the same. It's sort of a testament to evolving the right solution in place. Yeah, and look, what it also says is that in the past, we have seen ocean temperatures and conditions that are as bad or worse than say, but we're talking millions and millions of years ago. And what this is, what it seems to be, is a classic refuge situation where you could end up with corals everywhere else being killed and they survive in a place like the Hootmanabrolis.

18:49And then when conditions become more benign, then they can expand back out into other places again. Well, that is a long term plan. So moving back to temperature rises, I saw James Hansen. So he's the veteran, you know, former NASA scientist, climate scientist. He's saying that the upcoming El Nino this year, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago, it could actually lock in high temperatures. I know he's a controversial figure. And at the start, I was talking about some of these models showing that we could dip, we could get up to two degrees temporarily. But Hansen says he thinks if we do get this El Nino rising us up, that's it for 1.5 for sure.

19:33We're not going to get back down from that. But there's also another sort of glimmer of good news. I saw that France has just announced an actual plan to phase out coal, oil and gas by 2030, 2045 and 2050, respectively, which is slower than we'd like. But at least it is a plan and not just a sort of wavy. Yes, we've heard targets before, but this is a plan. Yeah. Yeah. So, Alec, about the European Commission report, what have they said following this horror show report? Yeah, yeah. I mean, what can we do about this terrible future that's in store for Europe? They stress two things. One is that we need to tackle climate change, stop the rise in temperatures.

20:18And along those lines, like you mentioned, there's plans to phase out coal in France. Also, this report announced that solar power in Europe accounted for 12.5 % of electricity produced in Europe in 2025. That's a new record. That's a new high-water mark for solar energy, which is really good news. And the whole picture for renewables was 46%. So Europe is getting to almost half of its electricity being produced by renewables, which is good progress. Also along those lines, there is this meeting this week in Colombia, which was called after the big climate summit in Brazil failed to produce the result that a lot of people were looking to it for, which was to agree a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels.

21:11That roadmap was torpedoed by petrostates. The United States, of course, boycotted the entire event. And the petrostates that were there would not agree on this roadmap. So several countries led by Colombia and several European countries and countries in South America and elsewhere said, we're going to have our own climate summit where we're going to actually have some ambition and actually talk about how we're going to transition away from fossil fuels. That's happening in Colombia this week. European leaders are there. Leaders from many other countries are there. And so hopefully they're hoping that that can kind of inject a little bit of vitality back into international climate negotiations, which have essentially become dead in the water because decisions have to be made unanimously.

22:00And there are always a few bad actors who are going to sink in. Saudi Arabia, the U.S., if they're there. Exactly. So that's on the side of stopping climate change. But then at the same time, even if we stop climate change, one thing they mentioned in the report is that they said we're going to overshoot 1.5. We're going to get warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius. So we need to prepare. So even if we stop climate change and we come back down below 1.5 degrees Celsius in the future, we need to prepare for catastrophic climate impacts during that time that we're over. the limit. They talked a lot about kind of building resilience into systems, basically spending money now to prepare people for drought, to build extra water reservoirs, to build fire breaks around national parks so that wildfires cannot spread beyond them and get out of control.

22:54These measures we can take now to build resilience and try to make Europe more better able to withstand the impacts of climate change that are coming down the pipeline. that's all for this week thanks to our guests Alec Loon and James Whipford and thanks to you for listening and do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts bye for now bye