The Mediterranean Sea is super hot. From Spain to the Balkans, including Portugal, Italy, and Greece, the first heat waves set new temperature records between late June and early July. In El Granado, Spain, it reached 46 degrees Celsius, which is a new high for June. In many places in Southern Europe and the Balkans, temperatures went over 40 degrees Celsius. These temperatures used to only happen in late July.

In Serbia, June 25th was the hottest day ever recorded so far. In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, it reached 38.8 degrees Celsius, which is the highest ever for that city (BBC). In Paris, part of the Eiffel Tower was closed because of the heat. In Greece, south of Athens and in Crete, the first fires have already started. In Turkey, more than 50,000 people had to leave their homes because of fires. In Italy, the Ministry of Health put 21 out of 27 cities under a "red alert" because of the extreme heat.

According to the United Nations group on climate change, heat waves are happening more often, are stronger, and last longer. This is because of climate change caused by people.

It's not just the air and land, but also the sea that feels the unusual warming. On June 22, the European Earth observation program, Copernicus, reported a big heat wave in the western Mediterranean Sea. This was especially between the Gulf of Lion and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Surface temperatures there were more than 5 degrees Celsius higher than usual for that time of year.

The next day, the Mediterranean Environmental Studies Center found the average temperature of the Mediterranean Sea was 25 degrees Celsius. This high temperature could make extreme weather worse and harm the balance of sea life (Costa Blanca Daily). A few days later, on June 29, Copernicus reported a sea temperature of 26 degrees Celsius. This was the highest ever recorded for June.

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It's painful to watch the climate unravel step by step before our eyes, and no action being taken where it should be — at the political level, on a global scale, to implement real policies required to have minimal impact on this global crisis.

Instead, we get heads in the sand, business as usual, feel-good micro-level solutions with no systemic impact, empty words and rhetoric, natalistic scapegoating and this vague, blind faith in some future technological miracle that will somehow save our planet, you know some kid with a startup, a billionaire with a sudden philantropic spasm of remorse (or for the loony fringe with a broken moral compass, to privately go colonise another planet after wrecking the one we have beyond repair...).

All of this so that we, in Earth's most climate-impacting countries — or those most responsible through the impact they’ve had on other nations to sustain their own way of life — can continue living as we do now.

Recent events show that even embracing an open slide into totalitarianism — one that pairs seamlessly with scapegoating, aggressive denial and self-serving nihilism — is now on the table if that’s what it takes to preserve our unsustainable, full-speed-ahead-into-the-wall way of life.

Here in Okinawa, people blame coral bleaching (80% of the reefs impacted in 2024) and record-high sea temperatures on the "lack of typhoons" to cool things down — as if tropical storms were supposed to mitigate the multiple effects of the climate crisis in 2025.
Maybe next they'll blame it on reef-safe sunscreen or blood sugar levels.
Who knows.

Edited July 5Jul 5 by bghazzal