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National weather service, Météo-France, says Tuesday was the hottest day since measurements began in 1947
France has registered its hottest day on record as 40 people across the country were confirmed to have drowned while swimming in unsupervised areas over the last few days.
“There is a tragic scourge of drownings,” prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Tuesday. “The latest figures we’ve received are 40 deaths since 18 June. Most of the victims are young people.”
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As hot weather becomes more common, companies and homeowners are coming up with innovative ways to keep properties cool
When graphic designer Marc Alabaster had a new set of glass doors installed at his West Sussex home eight years ago, he soon realised how they magnified the heat of the afternoon sun.
“The kitchen was 40-plus degrees,” he said. Then he went on holiday to Spain and saw an apartment building wrapped in louvre-like rows of angled fins or blades that shaded the external walls against the sun.
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Half a century on, Britain braces for temperatures up to 40C as global heating brings yet more extreme weather
The summer of 1976 is seared into national memory as one of record heat. Harvests failed, farmers despaired, Britain imported an extra million tonnes of grain, food prices rose by 12%, taps ran dry, and each day, 250 people died from heat-related deaths.
The heatwave, which began 50 years ago on Tuesday, brought 15 consecutive days on which the peak temperature was above 32C. Half a century later and 32C no longer feels shocking.
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Researchers say it is ‘quite wild’ to see fires at such high northern latitudes happen so early in the year
Scientists have expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a week of each other on the Arctic island of Greenland earlier this month.
Fires were burning close to Sisimiut, Greenland’s second largest town and a popular tourism centre, on 14 and 15 June, satellite imagery has shown, while a second blaze hit Kujalleq, on the island’s southern tip, on 17 June.
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The cost of the traditional takeaway has doubled since 2019, and more outlets are trying to tempt customers with cheaper options such as coley, pollack and hake
In late April, visitors to Harbour Lights in Falmouth, Cornwall, may have raised an eyebrow. The fish and chip shop was in the midst of a “cod-free week”, its owners having removed cod from its menu entirely.
It was the second time owner Pete Fraser had undertaken the experiment, 15 years after the first. He also removed cod from his shops in Penzance and Helston, replacing it with coley, pollack, hake and hoki. The result was very different. “Some of the feedback we had, which certainly wasn’t what we got when we ran it years ago, is ‘Can you repeat this?’ Before, it was like, ‘Have you guys lost your head’?”
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Energy secretary hails £100bn milestone in this parliament and says it is ‘only the start of what we want to achieve’
Ed Miliband has hailed a boost to UK jobs and growth as government data reveals that private sector companies have pledged more than £100bn in investment into the green economy so far in this parliament.
Offshore wind, solar power and the electricity grid make up the bulk of the planned investment, most of it between 2024 and 2031, which will go to all regions of the UK and comes from a mixture of UK companies and overseas sources including the EU and Japan.
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The country’s biggest tree – named Heaven Sword of the Da’an River – is a carbon-storing behemoth hosting whole neighbourhoods of wildlife. But this and other giant trees are under threat
The higher you climb up the gigantic, millennia-old trees of Taiwan’s forests, the more layers of habitat and life emerge. On the forest floor, ferns thrive in the moist shade. Flying squirrels and owls sleep inside the hollow tree trunks. Yellow bell-shaped rhododendron flowers spring from the lower tree canopy. Higher still, dense lichen spread. Up in cloud-drenched branches, a rare, hardy orchid, Bulbophyllum ciliisepalum, can be spotted.
“In one tree, every species has their preferred location,” says Dr Rebecca Hsu, assistant researcher at the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute. “Every metre the temperature, the wind, the sun, the light is different.”
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Researchers assessed likelihood gas was produced during creation of Alps, Pyrenees and Baetic mountains
Hydrogen gas is anticipated to play a central role in phasing out fossil fuels, particularly in industries that are proving more challenging to decarbonise, such as chemical production, shipping and steelmaking. But producing hydrogen synthetically is energy intensive and costly. In order for the hydrogen economy to take off, we need to find reliable natural sources of this gas. Could it be hidden in the mountains?
Researchers used plate tectonic simulations to investigate the Pyrenees, Alps and Baetic mountain ranges to assess if their mountain-building processes were likely to have resulted in hydrogen being produced and stored. Their findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, showed that the Alps and Pyrenees could be strong natural hydrogen exploration sites.
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Photographer Shane Hynan explores the tension between the central role peat bogs play in Irish life and their wider environmental impact
“You can read Ireland’s history in the boglands. They hold millennia in their layers,” says photographer Shane Hynan of his project, Beofhód (meaningBeneath in English).
The boglands, known as portachs in Irish, cover roughly 1.2m to 1.5m hectares or about 14% to 17% of the country’s total land area. The raised bogs of the Irish Midlands are made of peat that forms at a rate of 1mm a year (0.04in) in low-lying, poorly drained basins or former lakes. As the historical geographer Kevin Whelan observes in the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, “the bog has been etched as deeply into the human as into the physical record in Ireland – to an extent unrivalled elsewhere.”
Eddie and Con footing turf for domestic use, Knockirr Bog, County Kildare, 2022.
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In HBO documentary The Welcome Table, director Josh Fox brings together people from across the world whose lives have been dramatically altered by the climate crisis
In an age of division, director Josh Fox is hoping to bring people of all kinds together. Specifically, he wants them to share a table – to break bread for a meal, and come together in exuberant song.
In his new documentary film The Welcome Table, the director of the the Emmy-winning Gasland travels around the world to talk to people at the leading edge of global warming’s effects. The film is part stark warning of the climate crisis, part opportunity to enter into the experience of those living in the corners of the globe. It culminates with the sounds of these individuals together at an enormous table in New Orleans, eating and rejoicing.
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