Drought fears in Europe amid reports May was world's second hottest ever

It has been an
exceptionally dry spring in north-western Europe
and the second warmest May ever globally, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
Countries across Europehave been hit by drought conditions in recent months, with water shortages feared unless significant rain comes this summer, and crop failures beginning to be reported by farmers.
The new Copernicus data shows that May 2025 was the second-warmest May globally, with an average surface air temperature of 15.79 degrees, 0.53
degrees above the 1991-2020 average for May. The month was 1.4 degrees above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level. This interrupts a period of 21 months out of 22 where the global average temperature was more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial level.
Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), said: 'May 2025 breaks an unprecedentedly long sequence of months over 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial. Whilst this may offer a brief respite for the planet, we do expect the 1.5 degrees threshold to be exceeded again in the near future due to the continued warming of the climate system.'
READ MORE
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Climate change adds to Syria's problems as Damask rose harvests fade
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The 1.5 degrees is the climate target agreed by the 2015 Paris agreement. The target of 1.5 degrees is measured over a decade or two, so a single year above that level does not mean the target has been missed, but does show the climate emergency continues to intensify.
Every year in the past decade has been one of the 10 hottest, in records that go back to 1850.
Dry weather has persisted in many parts of the world.
In May 2025, much of northern and central Europe as well as southern regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey were drier than average.
Parts of north-western Europe experienced the lowest precipitation and soil moisture levels since at least 1979.
In May 2025, it was drier than average in much of north America, in the Horn of Africa and across central Asia, as well as in southern Australia, and much of both southern Africa and South America.
May also saw abnormally high sea surface temperatures in the north-eastern Atlantic, reaching the highest ever recorded, according to Copernicus. - Guardian

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Irish Times

15 hours ago

• Irish Times

‘Maybe Elon Musk is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories'

Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci via the songwriting chemistry of Lennon and McCartney to the Florida launch pad of Elon Musk's SpaceX , Helen Lewis's new book, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers, sets out to unravel the mystery of what we mean when we call someone a genius and asks whether the modern idea of genius as a class of special people is distorting our view of the world. There's a sense throughout the book that these people are modern versions of saints, that they're performing something sacred in our increasingly secular world. It is a really compelling argument, made by historian Darrin McMahon in his Divine Fury: A History of Genius, that during the Enlightenment, when people became more rationalist, less religious, we still craved this sense of the divine. The idea that miracles happen in the world. Where you might once have thought that a miracle was attributable to the Virgin Mary, now the miracle is: how did Van Gogh's paintings happen? How did someone have this moment of inspiration where they came up with this scientific breakthrough? There is this deep hunger within all of us for the world not to be mundane, for there to be things that are still extraordinary within it. Even the phrase 'gifted', which people sometimes use about children and young people. Gifted by whom and for what purpose? READ MORE In classical times, you were possessed by 'a genius'. The muse of poetry or whatever spoke through you. I think that was a much more healthy way to think about it. The argument in the book really is about this category of special people and what that does to us and to them. It's much healthier to say I've done something extraordinary rather than I'm an extraordinary person and everything I do is probably going to be brilliant. That's the bit that tends to lead people astray. You look in the book at the story of how Shakespeare became the figure that he is now. Part of that is these enablers who made sure the folios weren't destroyed and forgotten. And then there's a fascinating process of mythmaking, which is about Englishness and Britishness in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's a classic story for your purposes, isn't it? Because there is something extraordinary going on in those plays, but then there's a whole other process that involves lots of people. That's the bit I wanted to try to unpick. There's a bad version of this book that is falsely egalitarian and implies that there is no such thing as extraordinary achievement. You're hard-pressed to look at the plays of Shakespeare and think that. So, yeah, I'm not trying to argue that great achievement doesn't exist, but I think which achievements we choose to praise and flag up often has a political dimension to it too, which is worth exploring. Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers Then there's another element added to the mix, which is the idea of the artist as mad, bad and dangerous to know. The outsider who burns brightly and sputters out early. I find that really interesting because it isn't at all the idea of the artist that you have before then, If you take someone like a Rembrandt, he was painting portraits of rich Dutch people. There was no sense that in order to market himself, he needed to be wasting away in a cupboard somewhere. It's only when you get to the Romantics that we get so into the idea that great art has this terrible cost to people. Susan Sontag wrote about tuberculosis being part of that story. Tuberculosis, which spiked as people moved into cities, has a lot of symptoms that are quite similar to all the things that people used to say about Romantic poets. And that's hard to separate out from the rise of capitalism. The idea that artists don't rely on patronage any more. They now compete in the marketplace. My brutal conclusion about a lot of the way that we talk about genius is that it's really a kind of a branding exercise. The idea that the life itself is the work of art. One of the things that's really interesting is the hunger for people who achieve things to have had interesting biographies and the slight sense of disappointment when they don't, as if we feel like we've been cheated. The book is also very much about science and also about pseudoscience – when science gets too big for its boots. Someone like Francis Galton, who used to be very famous but has been airbrushed out of history by embarrassed institutions. He was an incredible 19th-century polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin from the same very talented family. He came to be interested in the idea of genius. He was grappling with the new ideas of evolution and natural selection and selective breeding. And that gets him to eugenics, which is the idea that you can 'improve a population' by only letting the smart people have babies. From that, you get this scientific discipline of eugenics that has absolutely no human empathy behind it. And it was really widely accepted. I used to work for the New Statesman magazine, which was founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were Fabian socialists. But part of the paternalism of their socialism was they were interested in the eugenics movement. I wrote in my last book, Difficult Women, about Marie Stopes, the great contraceptive pioneer, who was also madly interested, until the [19]30s, it was a respectable scientific endeavour. Because people hadn't yet had the vivid proof about what happened when this ideology was put into practice. The book is a very odd book. It pings about from Renaissance Florence to eugenics to The Beatles. When you put them all together, you begin to realise that we have these very deep ideas about human worth and that we're always fighting over them. [ Difficult Women book review: Whirlwind tour of feminism Opens in new window ] One of the other themes is that just because somebody is good at something, it doesn't mean they're necessarily good at anything else. But that seems to be a common fallacy. Yes, the book ends with Elon Musk, who I think is a great demonstration of this. It's hard for people on the left to acknowledge that he did have great success in business because of personal qualities. He's not purely a lucky idiot who wandered into his success with Tesla and SpaceX. However, the last six months have shown that he isn't good at everything. If I may say something controversial, maybe he also is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories. What it comes back to is humility. Just because you've had great success in one area, you should still be humble about all the other areas. Humility doesn't seem to come with most of these characters. There's a really interesting question about whether or not there are certain personality traits that make you more predisposed to either be a genius or get called a genius. A certain level of narcissism, because you're okay with people looking at you and bigging you up and you accept the attention and you thrive in it. You can take two people of absolutely equal achievements and the bigger narcissist will probably get called a genius more. You quote someone saying that in this world there are actors and there are movie stars. I think that there are these people who have those magnetic qualities to them. But yeah, it's really hard to separate it out, isn't it? You can't be a genius on your own. It's not an intrinsic quality to you. It's something that gets conferred on you by other people. There's a right-wing, left-wing element to this. On the one hand an emphasis on collaboration and community. And on the other, on the primacy of individual agency and the individual casting off the bonds of the little people all around him. Because of copyright, because of the patent system, because of people wanting to make money, it becomes winner takes all. Alexander Graham Bell becomes the inventor of the telephone, even though it was much more collaborative than that. You're a writer with t he Atlantic magazine and often cover politics. Some of these themes feed into what's happening right now, such as the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I have my own reservations about some aspects of DEI, but the crudeness of that assault uses language about excellence being damped down by it. Is there a resurgence of the genius myth happening right now? Definitely. One of the things I argue in the book is that every age has its own different template of genius, which tells you a lot about that society. Our current one is the tech superman, these brilliant start-up founders who have an insight that no one else does. And you are right, they are often guys who think that they're just special people. But to go back to Elon Musk, both Tesla and SpaceX had significant public investment. SpaceX, at its lowest point, got a Nasa contract that assured its future. So, yeah, the dynamism of the private sector contributed enormously to its success, but taxpayers' money was ultimately also part of the story of what allowed it to thrive. It's really tempting for people to believe that they made it all on their own, whereas what you usually need is talent, plus luck, plus society that lets you achieve stuff. [ Elon Musk sees humanity's purpose as a facilitator of superintelligent AI. That should worry us Opens in new window ] As you point out, there are millions of people who never got that opportunity. Like you, I have reservations about some of the way that that DEI has ended up being implemented. Things like the implicit bias test don't really seem to predict very well who is actually racist in real life. But go back and look at someone as brilliant a scientist as George Washington Carver, who was black and therefore never got to go to school. Or the fact that Jewish people were excluded from lots of the Ivy Leagues. The exclusion of women from the professions for a huge amount of history. The number of bright working-class kids who never got the opportunities they deserved. So for all that we are now in this period of backlash, I think you have to say that the small efforts that we've made towards allowing more people to realise their potential come against this background of a huge amount through human history of wasted talent. I'm thinking about all the children who died in war or starved to death. There's a quote from Stephen Jay Gould about people who got very into preserving bits of Einstein's brain. He said he was less interested in the exact form of Einstein's brain than in the people who were just as brilliant but who died working in sweatshops or cotton fields. The Genius Myth is published by Penguin This is an edited extract from an episode of the Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan podcast Is there any such thing as a political genius? With Helen Lewis Listen | 39:17

Irish Times

2 days ago

• Irish Times

Leaving Cert design and communication graphics (DCG): ‘True to form with something for everyone'

Today's Leaving Cert higher level Design and Communication Graphics paper had 'something for everyone'. Overall, Rob Kiernan, DCG teacher at The Institute of Education, said it was a paper that students should be really pleased with. One challenging moment came in the form of an 'unorthodox' question B-1, which might have caused some candidates to wobble as they moved through the paper. However, he said the general tone of the paper was one of familiarity, testing things that 'should be in everyone's arsenal.' READ MORE Leaving Cert, DCG higher level, Section A Section A Starting into the short questions of Section A, Mr Kiernan said every student will have found omething that suited them. 'For the more artistic visualisers, A-1's question on axonometric axes was pretty standard,' he said. 'This year the examination of axonometries was limited to the short questions as the examiner seems to return to form from previous years after last year's surprising reappearance in the long questions for a second year in a row.' The more mathematically minded will have been pleased with A-2's conics question, Mr Kiernan said. 'It is rather rare to see the elliptical outline as the hyperbolic/parabolic is much more common, so some might be kicking themselves for leaving it off their revision,' he said. A-3 on an oblique plane should have been familiar to anyone who has looked over past papers as it has been a 'meat and potatoes' question since 2009, he said. A-4 continued the trend of interpenetration of solids becoming more prevalent on the exams, and so those who had been monitoring how the papers had been progressing will be pleased. Section B Moving into the longer Section B questions, Mr Kiernan said students will have been thrown by a 'curveball' appearance of dynamic mechanism. 'This is a topic that typically appears in Section C and is totally optional in the exam, so some teachers might not have covered this specific material recently,' he said. Leaving Cert, DCG higher level, Sections B and C 'Students could still attempt the question as it was very fair and reminiscent of rotation, which is part of Junior Cert. transformational geometry. But this would have pushed students to really stretch into a corner of their memories that they were not anticipating, so many may simply skip this question and thus commit to doing B-2 and B-3.' Thankfully, he said, B-2 was a 'standard but all-encompassing question' on intersecting planes. 'All the key co-ordinates were given – sometimes they omit some for added challenge – and the tasks would be very familiar to those who had looked at previous questions,' he said. B-3 was a question on perspectives which Mr Kiernan many will welcome, not least because it reaffirmed the old relationship of a short axonometric question means a long perspective question and vice versa. 'These topics are often studied in tandem and firmly under a student's belt by the end of fifth year, so students will be happy that they are back in such familiar territory.' However, B-3(C) will have been trickier for some depending on how they comprehended the material. 'For those who can fully conceptualise the object in their minds it will be fine, but those who stick strictly to the procedural processing of the numbers and lines on the page will struggle to see how to procure the answer,' he said. Section C Students only needed to attempt one question from Section C, so will have been heavily influenced by what they covered in class. 'Schools which include engineering will tend towards C-4 on dynamic mechanism and C-5 on assemblies,' he said. 'The latter is strict test of draftsmanship in which the conventions are held to a very high standard of precision, but it really suits some. For many C-2 and C-3 will be their area of choice.' Those who had looked at trends of previous papers and anticipated this year would be the time for hyperboloid of revolution to appear will be 'thrilled'. 'This takes the basics of conics from A-2 but adds the 3rd dimension for lots of more complex geometry. For those who had prepared this task, it was a nice chance to shine,' Mr Kiernan said. 'C-3 was a standard take on surface geometry using a mocha jar as an example. This overlaps with the material of B-2 and really shows the value of transferable skills.' He said that both B-2 and C-3 looked for dihedral angles and while C-3 specified 'one-piece surface development', this was just a synonym for 'true shape' in B-2. 'If this was an area of the course you had any comfort with, this was a lovely question,' he said. Leaving Cert, DCG ordinary level, section A Leaving Cert, DCG ordinary level, sections B and C

Irish Times

3 days ago

• Irish Times

Only two years left to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees target, scientists warn

The planet's remaining carbon budget to meet the international target of 1.5 degrees has just two years left at the current rate of emissions, scientists have warned, showing how deep into the climate crisis the world has fallen. Breaching the target would ramp up the extreme weather already devastating communities around the world. It would also require carbon dioxide to be sucked from the atmosphere in future to restore the stable climate in which the whole of civilisation developed over the past 10,000 years. The carbon budget is how much planet-heating carbon dioxide can still be emitted by humanity while leaving a reasonable chance that the temperature target is not blown. The latest assessment by leading climate scientists found that in order to achieve a 66 per cent chance of keeping below the 1.5 degrees target, emissions from 2025 onwards must be limited to 80bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is 80 per cent lower than it was in 2020. Emissions reached a new record high in 2024: at that rate the 80bn tonne budget would be exhausted within two years. Lags in the climate system mean the 1.5 degrees limit, which is measured as a multiyear average, would inevitably be passed a few years later, the scientists said. READ MORE Scientists have been warning for some time that breaching the 1.5 degrees limit is increasingly unavoidable as emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue to rise. The latest analysis shows global emissions would have to plummet towards zero within just a few years to have any decent chance of keeping to the target. That appears extremely unlikely, given that emissions in 2024 rose yet again. However, the scientists emphasised every fraction of a degree of global heating increases human suffering, so efforts to cut emissions must ramp up as fast as possible. Currently, the world is on track for 2.7 degrees of global heating, which would be a truly catastrophic rise. The analysis shows, for example, that limiting the rise to 1.7 degrees is more achievable: the carbon budget for a 66 per cent chance of keeping below 1.7 degrees is 390bn tonnes, which is about nine years at the current rate of emissions. 'The remaining carbon budgets are declining rapidly and the main reason is the world's failure to curb global CO2 emissions,' said Prof Joeri Rogelj, at Imperial College London, UK. 'Under any course of action now, there is a very high chance we will reach and even exceed 1.5 and even higher levels of warming. 'The best moment to have started serious climate action was 1992, when the UN [climate] convention was adopted,' he said. 'But now every year is the best year to start being serious about emissions reduction. That is because every fraction of warming we can avoid will result in less harm and suffering, particularly for poor and vulnerable populations, and in less challenges to living the lives we desire.' The hottest year on record was 2024, fuelled by increasing coal and gas burning, and setting an annual average of 1.5 degrees for the first time. There is no sign yet of the transition away from fossil fuels promised by the world's nations at Cop28 in Dubai in December 2023. Solar and wind energy production is increasing rapidly and has precluded previous worst-case scenarios of 4 to 5 degrees of global heating. But energy demand is rising even faster, leading to more fossil fuel burning and turbocharging extreme weather disasters. The analysis, produced by an international team of 60 leading climate scientists, is an update of the critical indicators of climate change and is published in the journal Earth System Science Data. It aims to provide an authoritative assessment, based on the methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but published annually unlike the intermittent IPCC reports, the most recent of which was 2021. The study found that the Earth's energy imbalance – the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect – has risen by 25 per cent when comparing the past decade with the decade before. – Guardian