Marine heatwaves are increasing in frequency and intensity, causing mass mortality events and chronic stress in marine wildlife. Understanding these impacts reveals climate change as a welfare crisis.
Marine heatwaves reveal climate change as an immediate animal welfare catastrophe, not a future concern. When billions of intertidal animals cook in their shells during extreme heat events, each is experiencing a death by heat stress that we can directly attribute to anthropogenic climate change. The suffering involved in these events - from individual molluscs to seabird chicks starving as prey fish disappear - is enormous. Climate action is simultaneously the most important animal welfare intervention available to humanity and one where individual choices aggregate into meaningful collective impact.