https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/28/france-on-red-alert-as-heatwave-forecast-to-reach-record-45c?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2zbWjCVv2mGG1jf3aZajC_O_OeNwOqxwzcs3KBnQ-gEq1Jih3AN_ngXYA

France records all-time highest temperature of 45.9C

Record for mainland France falls in southern commune of Gallargues-le-Montueux as Europe swelters in heatwave

• What is causing the European heatwave?

Jon Henley and Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and Sam Jones in Madrid

Fri 28 Jun 2019 17.14 BSTFirst published on Fri 28 Jun 2019 09.13 BST

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 Aerial footage shows aftermath of wildfires in Spain – video

France recorded temperatures nearly two degrees higher than its previous record and firefighters continued to battle historic wildfires in Spain as much of western Europe remained in the grip of an extreme early-summer heatwave on Friday.

The French state weather forecaster, Météo-France, said the temperature in Gallargues-le-Montueux in the Gard département hit 45.9C at 4.20pm on Friday.

The previous 2003 record of 44.1C was beaten twice before on Friday: first when the southeastern town of Carpentras reached 44.3C, then hours later when Villevieille, in Provence, hit 45.1C.

“This is historic,” a Météo-France meteorologist, Etienne Kapikian, said. “It’s the first time a temperature in excess of 45C has ever been recorded in France.”

In Germany, the national DWD weather service said overall June temperatures were more than four degrees higher than historic averages for the month and 0.4C higher than the 2003 June average, the warmest since records began in 1881.

The World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva said 2019 was now firmly on course to be among the world’s hottest ever years and that 2015-2019 would then become the hottest five-year period on record.

While it was too soon to definitely attribute the Europe’s current blistering heatwave, which began on Monday, to climate change, it was “absolutely consistent” with extremes linked to the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, the UN agency said.

“Heatwaves will become more intense, they will become more drawn out, they will become more extreme, they will start earlier and they will finish later,” the WMO spokeswoman, Clare Nullis, told journalists.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said extreme weather would become more frequent as a result of global warming. “We will need to change our set-up, our way of working, build differently,” he said, stressing a necessary “adaptation of society and its habits”.

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Four administrative départements in France – Vaucluse, Gard, Hérault and Bouches-du-Rhône – were placed on red alert, signalling temperatures of “dangerous intensity” that are more typical of Saudi Arabia.

About 4,000 schools were closed in France as head teachers warned they could not guarantee safe conditions, local authorities cancelled many end-of-school-year carnivals, and nursing homes equipped the elderly with hydration sensors.

“This heat wave is exceptional by its intensity and how early it is,” the prime minister, Edouard Philippe, said, defending authorities’ efforts to avoid a repeat of the notorious 2003 heatwave which caused 15,000 premature deaths.

“I want to appeal to the sense of responsibility of citizens - there are avoidable deaths in every heatwave,” Philippe said. “Measures have been taken for the most vulnerable people but given the intensity of the heat wave, it’s the entire population who must be careful today ... both for oneself and for loved ones and neighbours.”

The French health minister, Agnès Buzyn, warned people tempted to plunge into cold water to do so only in designated public bathing areas, adding that four people had drowned since the beginning of the week.

A six-year-old child was also in life-threatening condition after being hit by water shooting from an illegally opened fire hydrant in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, French media reported.

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 Activists from Youth for Climate stage a sit-in in Paris. Photograph: Lewis Joly/AP

French families with elderly relatives who were ill or living alone were advised to call or visit them twice a day and take them to cool places, while the state-run rail operator SNCF offered free cancellations or exchanges on long-distance trips.

The greater Paris region, Ile de France, had already banned more than half of cars from its roads in an effort to reduce air pollution and the cities of Lyon, Strasbourg and Marseille have also restricted traffic.

With temperatures in parts of Spain expected to hit a new June record of 43C, the Spanish meteorological office issued red alerts in parts of Catalonia, Navarre and the Basque country.

Hundreds of firefighters in Catalonia continued to battle to bring a large wildfire under control which has so far burned through 6,500 hectares of land and could consume as many as 20,000ha.

A 17-year-old Spanish boy died from heatstroke in the early hours of Friday after having convulsions when he jumped into a swimming pool to cool down, while an 80-year-old man died on Thursday after collapsing from what is thought to have been heatstroke in the city of Valladolid.

Italy put 16 cities under alerts for high temperatures, and civil security services distributed water to tourists visiting famed sites around Rome under a scorching sun and in Berlin, a police unit turned water cannon usually used against rioters on city trees to cool them down.

As Germans attempted to cool off amid scorching temperatures, at least four people died in bathing accidents in different parts of the country on Wednesday. Parts of Britain were expected to experience high temperatureson Saturday, with a high of 32C forecast for London.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/24/health/plastic-pollution-rivers-oceans-scn-intl/index.html?utm_source=fbCNNi&utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2019-06-29T21%3A03%3A27&fbclid=IwAR2m8ru9sza7-VSLn7it4B_Yox50z38C3oO0JK8N6W_83WLVfW3NOyPR4jc

How rivers became the plastic highway into the oceans

By Mark Tutton and Ed Scott-Clarke, CNN

Updated 0307 GMT (1107 HKT) June 25, 2019

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Source: CNN

The plastic river flowing into the sea 02:05

London (CNN)Millions of tons of plastic enter the oceans every year, polluting our seas, littering our beaches and endangering wildlife.

Plastic can take centuries to break down, and instead of quietly disappearing beneath the waves, it has a way of coming back to haunt us.

Almost 1 million shoes and over 370,000 toothbrushes were among more than 400 million pieces of plastic recently found washed up on a remote group of islands in the Indian Ocean.

Great chunks of plastic have been found inside the stomachs of everything from seabirds to whales, while tiny microplastics are eaten by fish and other sea creatures, ending up as part of the food chain.

That same plastic can even end up in humans. A recent study found that globally, we are swallowing an average of 5 grams of plastic every week -- although that doesn't all come from the oceans.

Read: The man who fishes for plastic from a floating bicycle

The health risk from these microplastics is still relatively unknown, but it begs the question, how does all that plastic even end up in the sea, and how can we stop it from getting there in the first place?

Are you eating plastic? 01:30

Rivers of plastic

A 2017 study found that around 90% of all the plastic in the world's oceans flows there through just 10 rivers. Eight of those rivers were in Asia, and two in Africa. They all run through highly populated areas, which also lack effective waste collection, meaning trash often ends up in the river.

You could be swallowing a credit card's weight in plastic every week

The researchers concluded: "The more waste there is in a catchment area that is not disposed of properly, the more plastic ultimately ends up in the river and takes this route to the sea."

But plastic is getting into rivers all over the world.

Read: It's not just the oceans - microplastic pollution is all around us

Thames21 is a group that organizes clean-ups along the foreshore of the River Thames, in the UK, and educates people to not pollute it.

"We're finding that we are having a real reduction in the amount of plastic bags that we found and the bottles that we found," says Luke Damerum, who works with the group.

Video: What is a microplastic?

Its prime target now is wet wipes, which are often flushed down toilets and are discharged into the river from the sewers after heavy rainfall. They can end up lining the foreshore in a thick carpet.

"If this stuff remains on the foreshore, a lot of it will just break down into smaller and smaller pieces into ... microplastics," explains Damerum. "These microplastics will ... eventually go down towards the estuary and then out into the open ocean."

The group removed 23,000 wet wipes from one stretch of the Thames foreshore in just two hours in March -- enough to fill 473 bin bags.

Volunteers with Thames21 cleaning up the river.

Clothes, car tires and cosmetics

Plastics are so ubiquitous in our lives that there are countless other sources of plastic pollution.

In the eastern United States, the Hudson River carries 300 million clothing fibers into the Atlantic Ocean every day, according to a 2017 study. About half of the fibers are plastic, many entering the water network when clothes are machine washed.

Clothes can also shed fibers into the air, as can car tires and waste plastic left in landfills -- which can all end up in our rivers and seas.

Fertilizers made from sewage sludge -- the by-product of sewage water treatment -- are another source. The sludge can contain microfibers from clothes and other plastics washed into the sewers. As these fertilizers dry out, some of the plastics can get carried off the land by the wind, or wash directly into rivers.

Then there are the microbeads that are added to toothpaste, body scrubs, cosmetics and soaps. A 2015 study estimated that 8 trillion microbeads entered U.S. aquatic habitats daily. Since then, microbeads have been banned from some products in countries including the USthe UK.

The shipping and fishing industries also play a part. In 2018 researchers found that, in terms of weight, almost half of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a notorious area of floating trash three times the size of France -- was made up of fishing nets. On the other hand, microplastics made up 94% of the estimated 1.8 trillion tiny pieces floating in the area.

To solve a problem, you must first understand it

So what can be done to solve the problem?

If you drink bottled water, you may double how many microplastic particles you ingest, study says

Professor Richard Lampitt, of the National Oceanography Centre, in the UK, says technological advances can help, like better filters in washing machines to catch microfibers -- as can industry moves to develop less damaging plastics.

Read: How our trash is destroying paradise

But while he believes that research into solutions is important, he says it's vital that we develop a better understanding of exactly how plastic is transported into the oceans, how it degrades and what damage it is doing.

"There's considerable uncertainty about how much plastic pollution is coming from all these different sources," he told CNN.

"We need to have our eyes on what the nature of this problem is. How much plastic is there? How does it get there? How does it get transformed during its passage to the sea, and what harm does it do at the concentrations that it's found?

"These are really important questions to resolve."