Photograph Source: Frenchbluesman – CC BY 4.0
Have we become so desensitized to alarm from the many life-jarring troubles around the world that we can’t see the reality of human-induced global warming? The same way violence in film, television, and 24-7 streamed news has desensitized us to war and conflict, compartmentalized as something from afar. Not in my backyard. I can’t hear you. Well, the heat is here, whether we admit it or not, no more evident than this summer in Europe.
Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and the UK have all suffered extreme heat events in 2026, breaking previous temperature records, while much of the northern hemisphere is undergoing increased hot and dry conditions, impacting agriculture and producing more fires. Record surface temperatures above 33 °C (91.4 F) in the Mediterranean Sea (warmer than the Gulf of Mexico) are also intensifying heat waves across Europe. The Romanian navy even blew up a large underwater rock in a controlled explosion to increase flow to the Old Danube river to provide more cooling to the Cernavodă nuclear power plant amid reduced electric grid output. Mitigation and adaptation may be all we have left.
In the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presented a series of climate disasters in seemingly off-the-radar, underdeveloped countries, but those same disasters are now occurring in developed countries as global temperatures rise and extreme events become more frequent, producing stronger storms, worsening drought that is devastating farms, and generating more virulent fires across wide swathes of land. Amid the worst-ever fire season this past July in Spain and France, former Australian fire and rescue commissioner Greg Mullins stated, “Countries that have always burnt are burning more and countries like the UK, Norway, Greenland that have never burnt are now burning.”
Spain was first to dominate the news cycle this summer as temperatures soared past 40 °C (104 °F) throughout much of the country, intensifying wildfires in Almería that killed 13 people unable to evacuate through instant walls of fire ignited in dried-out vegetation. Wildfires west of Madrid and in Ávila destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, while some are still burning. One Zaragoza city temperature sign showed 56 °C in direct sunlight and Sumacàrcer in Valencia registered a sensación térmica (feels like) over 60 °C. Increased “desertification” across the Iberian Peninsula is now a major concern.
Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez called a climate emergency “to address the increasingly extreme impacts of climate change,” noting that “climate change denial is the worst fuel” as opposition leaders questioned the reality of human-induced global warming and extreme weather from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The politicization of climate stress is worsening, where ecology is blasted as a new kind of communism.
France especially suffered with 5,700 excess deaths in June, many in Paris among the elderly. In July, in the southwest of France, in the Gironde and Landes regions near Bordeaux, more than 250,000 people were evacuated and 240 homes destroyed amid horrific, out-of-control fires and record-breaking daily temperatures over 40 °C. As the fires threatened the city of Bordeaux, French authorities curtailed the final day of the Tour de France to provide more support.
Because of increased temperatures and longer summers, vegetation is becoming drier, creating more fires and drying out even more land in a horrific climate feedback. Apocalyptic scenes in the Gironde were described with 35-metre “Dantesque” flames as one resident who escaped the fire said, “It was like the end of the world.” Fifty firefighters were injured, while the world saw firsthand the effects of a new type of climate reality, the pirocumulonimbus or “fire cloud” that heats the air even more, spreading toxic ash as dry crisp vegetation is gobbled up. Lightning can also occur, threatening even more fires.
All of Wales was in drought after the driest July in 190 years as well as half of England, causing the natural environment to “deteriorate” and damaging agriculture and food supplies. The UK is undergoing a fifth summer heat wave as the countryside turns from green to brown. All 27 citiesmonitored by the Italian health ministry were under red alert as people were “advised to avoid sunlight, sweet carbonated drinks, coffee, and alcohol.”
Elsewhere, South Korea recorded the highest temperatures ever and issued an outdoor activity alert as temperatures passed 40 °C for five consecutive days. Hong Kong recorded its highest temperatures since 1884. This past year, wildfires began much sooner than usual in Canada, causing smoky skies across southern Ontario and parts of the United States, affecting FIFA World Cup matches and producing the world’s worst air quality in Toronto on July 15. This past week in British Columbia a state of emergency was declared. When does a local emergency become a global emergency?
Numerous regions have suffered unimaginable horrific scenes in the past few years, killing residents, destroying homes, and wiping out large parts of towns as yet another unprecedented fire is added to the record books: Fort McMurray, Alberta (2016), Lytton, British Columbia (2021), Jasper National Park in Alberta (2024). In 2009, 173 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed during Australia’s worst-ever “Black Summer” bushfires. In 2018 in Greece, 104 people died as fires approached Athens. In 2024, over 1,000 fires burnt in Portugal.
Today, BC and the northwest US are under constant threat. Few of us will forget the daily scenes in Los Angeles last year as over 18,000 homes and buildings were destroyed, aided by 100-mph hurricane-force Santa Ana winds. An independent wildfire map that uses data from NASA’s VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) shows over 27,000 current wildfires, almost 16,000 labelled as “critical.”
At the same time, oil companies are racking up record profits. The US president supports even more oil production, despite cartoonish comments by the oil industry’s number-1 lobbyist that oil companies are “making too much money,” showing that lawmakers are beholden to profits at all costs. The rah-rah war strategy in Iran that sustains $80/barrel oil prices is a boon to oil producers, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP, shamelessly profiting from yet another war over oil to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Pentagon is the number-1 consumer of oil on the planet, costing billions of dollars annually and “a stunning volume of pollution.” War is now just another business. Eat, drink, and be merry, tomorrow will be even hotter.
It’s not like we didn’t know. Global warming was forecast as far back as the start of the Industrial Revolution. The French mathematician Joseph Fourier, the Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall, and the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius all did early work to establish the now well-known, heat-trapping properties of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Often overlooked, US scientist Eunice Foot was the first to posit that carbon dioxide could heat the air in her 1856 paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.”
Popular Mechanics has published numerous articles on climate change, including Remarkable Weather of 1911 (1912), Is Our Climate Changing? (1930), Coal Dust Speeds Melting of Ice by Absorbing Sun’s Heat (1940), and What’s Happening to the Weather (1957). American geochemist Wally Broeker coined the term “global warming” in a 1975 Science paper, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?,” stating that “the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1,000 years.” We have long known the science and the consequences.
In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, 350.org’s Bill McKibben wrote that “The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished.” Citing numerous examples, including hotter air (holding more vapor), increased rainfall, more desert, more lightening, increased ocean heat (more hurricanes), higher acidic seas, more drought, dry rivers (e.g. Lake Mead), lost seafront, lower farm yields, disappearing glaciers, no more coral reefs (perhaps by 2050), and vanishing species, he noted that more of the earth is “now experiencing a tropical climate.”
And yet every year, greenhouse gases continue to rise, carbon dioxide now at 429.12 ppm and methane at 1937.59 ppb. With a world population of over 8 billion, double 50 years ago, growth-based consumerism is exacerbating a runaway crisis, aided and abetted by profiteering corporations and denialist governments. Rome is literally burning as we fiddle.
So what can we do? Better forest management, warning systems, and fire breaks are all needed. Upon visiting the fire-ravaged Gironde, French president Emanuel Macron compared the situation to World War II and vowed to “rebuild a different kind of forest.” One hopes that includes ending subsidized industrial biomass that falsely accounted for 10% of Europe’s “green” energy.
Citing the buildup to the 2024 Olympics, former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo championed a progressive green strategy with more green spaces, cycle lanes, and electric buses (1,000 now and counting). Solar canopies that provide both power and shade are now mandatory for large French parking lots.
Less is more: oil, plastic, mindless consumption. But will any of it be enough as temperatures continue to rise? Oddly, the newly reformed Schuman Square outside the EU headquarters in Brussels is mostly concrete, called “Europe’s largest frying pan,”while a green canopy was shelved from the plans,
Increased green energy will help. More solar and wind power has been installed in the past two years than in the previous 20 years. We may see a green grid and 100% EVs by 2050. The exponential growth of cheap renewable energy (95% new energy installations) and the rise of electric vehicles (20% of new car sales) are displacing more fossil fuels year on year.
Each year, electric vehicles cut into the global oil supply. At the current rate of conversion, China’s public transportation will be 100% electric by 2035, displacing more than 1 million barrels of diesel fuel per day. The “inflection point” – the moment of price parity between gasmobiles and EVs – will signal the end, coming soon as battery prices continue to fall. With increased EV adoption, roadside pollution is also being reduced.
We have no choice but to change our ways, sooner than later as our climate worsens. We are already in crisis, never mind a limited petroleum supply that will eventually run out this century. Where once we could choose to change, change is now being forced upon us despite our unwillingness and a callous oil industry spurred on by compliant politicians. The heat is on. The disaster spectacle is real.
