The Google Trends website indicates that there has been a significant spike in Google searches for the term 'blue green algae' over the past month or so, as depicted below.
The website shows that searches for the term spiked in the last week of June (24/06/18-30/06/18) and continued to rise into the first week of July.
This is partly just a seasonal thing: late June/early July is midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the higher temperatures over the summer period provide an ideal environment for the growth of algal blooms. As such, the Google Trends website shows that in most years there is a jump in searches for blue-green algae in late June and early July.
It does appear, however, that this year, summer temperatures have been abnormally warm in many parts of the world.
Last week, a Sky News report noted that in the last week of June, record-breaking temperatures were experienced in a swathe of regions around the world, including in Ireland, Wales, Oman, Georgia, Armenia and Colorado in the US. And Montreal in Canada recorded its highest temperature in nearly 150 years on the 28th of June.
Judging by this report last week from the English-language Chinese news website Ecns.cn, China didn't escape the summer heatwave:
...The past month was the second-hottest June on record in China. And to make matters worse, the heat wave isn't going away anytime soon, with temperatures expected to flirt with 40 C within the next few days in some regions, weather forecasters warned...
Given that warmer conditions promote the growth of cyanobacteria, I think it is a fairly safe assumption that blue green algae have been thriving in lakes around the globe over the past few weeks.
In China, there was a report back on the 31st of May, also from the aforementioned website, about a problematic blue green algae bloom at lake Taihu, to the west of Shanghai.
Lake Taihu, which has been mentioned here previously, is one of the largest freshwater lakes in China, nearly 40 kms long from north to south, and almost as wide.
In June, the maximum temperature recorded around this lake was higher than the May maximum, so it is possible that the blue green algae problem here may have magnified as a result.
Meanwhile, in the US, algal blooms have become so problematic at a Florida lake that a $10 million dollar prize was recently announced by an organisation called the Everglades Foundation, and is offer to anyone who can fix it:
I think all of this would add some weight to the view, as mentioned by a number of posters here over the past week, that the capital raising announced on the 2nd of July was not out of necessity. More likely, it was simply because the company has recently become overwhelmed by work, and a share placement to institutional investors would have been the quickest way to raise money to stay on top of everything.
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