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Total greenhouse gas emissions fell by 24% between 1990 and 2014 but road transport emissions rose by 17%, European Environment Agency data shows

Road transport has bucked a downward trend in European greenhouse gas emissions, growing by 17% between 1990 and 2014, at the same time that emissions from other sectors fell by almost a quarter.

Cars, vans and lorries reported the biggest absolute increase of any sector in CO2 emissions over the last 25 years, growing by 124 megatonnes (Mt), European Environment Agency (EEA) data published on Tuesday shows.

Thousands of people labouring in hot temperatures have been succumbing to a deadly kidney disease, and as the planet warms, the problem is likely to spread

A mysterious and deadly kidney disease has been plaguing labourers in the sugar fields of Central America. In the past 20 years, some 20,000 workers have died of the disease, and the crisis has been growing worse.

At first the epidemic was thought to be caused by chemicals such as pesticides, but the disease only affected labourers in coastal areas – those working at higher altitude in hills were largely unaffected.

Related: Florida wakes up to climate change

Survey shows a majority of Chinese tourists and about a third of US and UK visitors will travel to somewhere other than Australia

If the bleaching continues on the Great Barrier Reef, tourists say they will pack their bags and go elsewhere, taking with them an estimated $1bn a year and costing 10,000 jobs in regional Queensland, according to a new poll.

The majority of Chinese tourists, and about a third of UK and US tourists, said if severe bleaching continues, and “some of the reef dies completely,” they would be more likely to visit somewhere other than Australia, according to the online polling of more than 4,000 people commissioned by the Australia Institute

Related: Does the Great Barrier Reef's death haunt the dreams of coal's company directors? | David Ritter

Improvements to ocean temperature measurements are making good measurements great

I have often said that global warming is really ocean warming. As humans add more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, it causes the Earth to gain energy. Almost all of that energy ends up in the oceans. So, if you want to know how fast the Earth is warming, you have to measure how fast the oceans are heating up.

Sounds easy enough at first, but when we recognize that the oceans are vast (and deep) we can appreciate the difficulties. How can we get enough measurements, at enough locations, and enough depths, to measure the oceans’ temperatures? Not only that, but since climate change is a long-term trend, it means we have to measure ocean temperature changes over many years and decades. We really want to know how fast the oceans’ temperatures are changing over long durations.

We can see the effects of climate change in our oceans. To do this, we measure changes in temperature in our oceans over decadal time scales. Measuring the temperature of ocean water is not a new thing, it has been done for hundreds of years, and over time, measurement techniques have changed. In modern times, the XBT has been used extensively to measure ocean temperature and is only one of many methods. XBT data is special because it comprises ~50% of historical data between 1967 and 2001, a huge resource for oceanographers and for estimates of decadal changes in ocean temperature.

Small biases in the historical XBT data have been identified and various bias corrections have been developed which greatly improve the XBT data for climate change estimates. This work focusses on a purely physical method to estimate a fall rate for the XBT, which is unusual in the field of bias correction estimates. By looking at the physical shape of the XBT probe the fall rate is modelled. Other bias correction studies have looked at comparisons between XBTs and other instruments.