Just Stop Oil protesters with a police officer outside Westminster Abbey in central London after they spray painted “1.5 is dead” on the grave of Charles Darwin, in the north aisle of the nave of the Abbey, January 13, 2025
JUST STOP OIL activists painted the grave of British naturalist Charles Darwin today to demand an end to reliance on fossil fuels by 2030.
Two activists entered Westminster Abbey and sprayed “1.5 Is Dead” on the grave after it was confirmed that 2024 was the first year on record with a global average temperature exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
During the action, the supporters said: “We have passed the 1.5° threshold that was supposed to keep us safe
“Darwin would be turning in his grave to know we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.
“The government’s plans will take us to over 3 degrees of warming.
“This will destroy everything we love. World leaders must stop burning oil, gas and coal by 2030.”
October to April is normally considered to be the wet season in California, yet this January, the region is experiencing some of the most devastating fires it’s ever seen.
As of January 10, five major fires in and around Los Angeles have burned over 29,053 acres, leading to the evacuation of more than 180,000 people, the destruction of over 2,000 buildings (mainly homes), and an estimated damage cost of at least US$52 billion (£42.5 billion). Ten lives have been lost, and these numbers are expected to rise as the fires continue to burn.
The exact causes of each fire are still under investigation. However, several factors have contributed to their rapid spread and intensity.
The seasonal Santa Ana winds are particularly strong this year, bringing low humidity, dry air and high wind speeds. Southern California has received less than 10% of its average rainfall since October 2024, creating dry conditions that make the area highly vulnerable to fire.
Unusually wet winters in both 2022-23 and 2023-24 led to increased vegetation growth, providing more fuel for the fires. This cycle of wet and dry extremes, known as “hydroclimate whiplash”, is part of the increasingly intense climate cycles caused by climate change.
Hydroclimate whiplash can occur virtually anywhere. These cycles can cause extreme wildfires, such as those in California, where rapid vegetation growth is followed by drying. They can also exacerbate flooding when unusually heavy rains hit the dry-baked ground, then run off over the land rather than seeping in, leading to flash flooding.
In Los Angeles, some neighbourhoods have been almost entirely destroyed. Jae C. Hong / Alamy
The human impact of hydroclimate whiplash
Rapid transitions between extreme wet and dry conditions have significant and wide-ranging impacts on people, a focus of my academic research, affecting everything from public health to economic stability and social equity.
As we have seen in California, there is the immediate impact of loss of life, property and livelihoods. We have also seen this during whiplash-induced floods and landslides, such as those experienced across California in 2023 and east Africa in 2024, when years of drought were followed by weeks of rain.
Fires exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular diseases through their polluting smoke. Flooding creates conditions for waterborne illnesses such as cholera, leptospirosis or norovirus to rip through populations. Extreme swings in temperature can also create more heat-related illnesses, as human bodies struggle to adapt quickly. It is estimated that the health-related impacts of climate change will cost US$1.1 trillion by 2050.
And these impacts are not evenly distributed. While this month’s wildfires are affecting some of the richest communities in the US, it is generally low-income communities and vulnerable populations that are disproportionately affected, with limited resources to prepare for or recover from extreme events. Across the world, poorer populations are experiencing a 24%-48% increase in drought-to-downpour events, exacerbating their vulnerability and widening the health equity gap.
All these events and concerns also lead to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), resulting from displacement and trauma. Such human impacts are harder to measure, and often under-reported.
Adaptation and resilience
As climate change intensifies hydroclimate whiplash events, the human impacts are expected to grow more severe. Addressing these challenges will require coordinated efforts across multiple sectors, with a focus on both mitigation and adaptation strategies to protect human health, economic stability and social equity.
Governments and local authorities will need to implement co-management approaches for both drought and flood risks, alongside developing more flexible water management systems and infrastructure. Investing in natural infrastructure to enhance biodiversity and ecosystems will reduce risks to humans, both by restricting the effects of climate change and lowering the risks of fire and flooding.
As individuals we can often feel powerless, but environmental campaigns and movements have been highly successful in changing government policies. In the UK, the 2008 Climate Change Act and the net zero by 2050 legislation were the direct result of citizen lobbying and action, and the same can be said for numerous renewable energy transition policies around the world.
In California, we have seen the devastating effect of hydroclimate whiplash – and this won’t be the last we see. By calling on our governments to produce adaptation and resilience strategies that recognise climate change as a long-term human and economic risk factor, we can be more prepared for these events.
Racism is central to Reform UK, but the party is also entangled with anti‑establishment fakery, climate change denial, transphobia, misogyny and pro‑corporate policies.
The anti-establishment fakery was on display last November, when Farage posted on social media, “Big business and big government work together. There is nothing about Sir Keir Starmer that represents change.”Adding to this already vile concoction of politics is misogyny and transphobia. This was on display at Reform UK’s recent regional conference in Leicester, where Tice opened his speech with a transphobic joke about pronouns. The result is an over-arching package of the politics of division. This is hardly a surprise from a party whose senior members say they look to Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN) and the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as inspiration.
Farage likes to paint Reform UK as the insurgent force in British politics. He claims that Reform UK is “very much on the side of the little guy or woman”. Its MPs often denounce the two-party system and multinational corporations in favour of “real entrepreneurship”. This language is an attempt to mobilise the historic base of the far right, which has typically built among small producers and independent professionals.
But Reform UK is as establishment as it gets. Four out of the five Reform UK MPs—Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Rupert Lowe and Lee Anderson—are millionaires.
Its policies are a mish-mash of pro-corporate proposals. Tax cuts for business, austerity measures totalling £50 billion a year, a massive programme of deregulation, tax relief for private healthcare, abolishing inheritance tax for property under £2 million and scrapping net zero climate targets.
It’s clear the party stands for putting more money in the pockets of the bosses and the rich.
And it uses climate denial to drive further division. Deputy leader Richard Tice is one of the worst for this. At one point he stated “there is no climate crisis” and claimed “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food”.
Adding to this already vile concoction of politics is misogyny and transphobia. This was on display at Reform UK’s recent regional conference in Leicester, where Tice opened his speech with a transphobic joke about pronouns. The result is an over-arching package of the politics of division. This is hardly a surprise from a party whose senior members say they look to Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN) and the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as inspiration.
A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire as it burns a structure in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, January 7, 2025
World’s wealthiest 1% have already burned through their share of the entire annual carbon limit, Oxfam warns
THE world’s wealthiest 1 per cent have already burned through their share of the entire annual carbon limit, a damning analysis of super-rich climate destruction has revealed.
A new study by charity Oxfam has analysed the “global carbon budget” — the amount of CO2 that can be emitted without exceeding the international target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Its findings showed that while the richest capitalists had already exceeded that limit in the first 10 days of 2025, it would take someone from the poorest half of the global population nearly three years to use up their share.
Inaction will continue to have deadly consequences, the charity said — and eight in 10 deaths from heat will occur in low and lower-middle-income countries.
Oxfam estimated that by 2050, emissions by the 1 per cent will cause crop losses that could have provided enough calories to feed at least 10 million people a year in eastern and southern Asia.
Emissions from the ultra-wealthy are also causing trillions in economic losses -– the impact on low and lower-middle-income countries over the past three decades has been three times greater than the total climate finance provided by wealthy nations.
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A spokesperson for Just Stop Oil also issued a rallying call, saying: “We live within a system that serves the few over the many, and the rich are on course for destroying all our lives if they carry on unopposed. We must get organised and resist.
“We need a revolution in politics and economics, and we need to reclaim Parliament from the corporations and billionaires, whilst prioritising the interests of ordinary people.”
Last year, much of the world’s largest coral reef system was transformed into a white boneyard, featuring ghostly silhouettes of horns, brains and lettuces. The threat of sudden biodiversity loss from climate change had been realised through what’s known as a mass bleaching event.
The abrupt loss of many species from a system is generally attributed to a breakdown in ecological functioning. As species are sequentially knocked out, the whole community becomes unstable, and it all comes crashing down. There is, however, another mechanism that may be at play.
In our new paper, colleagues and I argue that despite the fact life on Earth displays such great variety, many species that live together appear to share remarkably similar thermal limits. That is to say, individuals of different species can tolerate temperatures up to similar points.
Ghost brains and lettuces: corals turn white when the water is too warm. blueplanet97 / shutterstock
This is deeply concerning as it suggests that, as ecosystems warm due to climate change, species will disappear from an ecosystem at the same time rather than gradually, resulting in sudden biodiversity loss. It also means that ecosystems may exhibit few symptoms of heat stress before a threshold of warming is passed and catastrophic losses occur.
One way we can see this is by looking at how species are distributed across the globe to infer their maximum tolerance to heat. In doing so, it becomes apparent that species living in the same places tend to have similar tolerances, warning of potentially abrupt losses of biodiversity in the decades to come.
This will be felt most acutely in the tropics, where maximum tolerances are closest to the temperatures already experienced by its inhabitants.
Ground truthing
These “global models” are rather abstract, however. Do we find the same phenomenon if we actually go out into the natural world and test this? Scientists can do just that by measuring the temperatures at which species stop being able to function normally by putting them through “heat trials” (think of it as a sauna for bugs or plants).
The trees that make up a rainforest canopy in Panama are a good place to start. Surely, with all their weird and wonderful shapes, we might expect the wide variety of species here to have variable tolerances to warming? It turns out they don’t. By measuring photosynthetic rates in leaves, researchers have shown that the leaves of many tree species malfunction at roughly 50°C.
But what about animals? To work out their thermal limits, biologists heat up creatures until they fall over to predict when they would become incapacitated by heatwaves in the wild.
A few years ago, I conducted experiments on 45 species of dung beetle in south-east Asia, showing that almost half of them stopped functioning normally at around 39°C. When the lush forests of Borneo get too hot, we might expect half of their resident dung beetles to go extinct as temperatures reach this threshold. Without these diligent forest caretakers, the dung could really hit the fan.
Ecologically crucial – and vulnerable to hot temperatures. Andries Combrinck / shutterstock
My colleagues and I reviewed the literature to identify several mechanisms that may drive these similar warming tolerances. The first operates at the scale of our entire planet. The most common temperatures on Earth are relatively hot, as the tropics cover a much larger area than the poles. This could drive species to be adapted to the conditions that have been most prevalent, meaning many of them have the same tolerance to high temperature.
Alternatively, we know that tolerances to heat evolve slowly compared to tolerances to the cold. We are unsure why this is the case, but it might simply be that it is highly costly (and therefore difficult to evolve) a change in molecular make-up that would allow a species to tolerate more heat. For example, at higher temperatures cell membranes become more fluid. Perhaps the costs of preventing cell death in such conditions are simply too high.
Hope for the future
Without deep and rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, clustered thermal tolerances will continue to threaten the ecosystems on which humanity depends. Regardless of whether drivers occur at the scale of proteins or planets, understanding how and why species have similar thermal tolerances may give us clues as to how we can promote climate change resilience in the natural world.
For example, we know that more distantly related groups of species will probably have more diverse thermal tolerances. A practical step we can take, therefore, is to protect a wide-ranging sample of the tree of life through conservation action. If distinct lineages of life are protected, we increase our chances of harbouring a diverse portfolio of responses to warming.
Crucially, by advancing our understanding of why, and in what contexts, thermal tolerances are more similar, we can predict where and when catastrophic declines may occur. Are they more similar in reefs or rainforests, in Africa or Antarctica? When we answer such questions, we can intervene in at-risk systems, safeguarding the future of our fragile planet.
Joseph Williamson, Research Fellow in Biological Responses to Climate Change, UCL
