Continued Fossil Fuel Emissions Could Nearly Triple the Destruction of European Wildfires by 2100

“Fire management,” said one researcher, “cannot replace climate mitigation.”

A firefighter runs as wildfire intensifies in the village of Sidiro and Yannuli in Evros, Greece on August 31, 2023.
(Photo by Ayhan Mehmet/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Aug 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Wildfires raging across Europe this summer have burned through more than 1.4 million acres across France, Spain, Italy, and even countries with typically milder climates, including the United Kingdom and Belgium—and a study published Thursday warned that the continuation of high carbon emissions would nearly triple the amount of burnt land from wildfires by the end of the century.

Climate action that reduces emissions, including a transition away from fossil fuel extraction and toward solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources, would mean about 39% more land would be burned through during fire seasons across the European Union by 2100, according to the research by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).



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But if policymakers fail to take sufficient action, according to the researchers’ models, an estimated 192% more land would be burned each year by the end of the century.

The massive increase in wildfire destruction would likely mean major upheaval across Europe; as wildfires tore through Spain and France last month, nearly 270,000 people were forced to evacuate.

Hundreds of people have been killed in European wildfires over the past decade, including at least 14 people in Spain’s recent blazes, which grew rapidly amid soaring temperatures, and three firefighters in Greece.

The researchers at PIK compared the projected annual burnt area for 2070-2100 with a model of results for the period between 2000-2030. An increase in hot, dry weather, which scientists have linked to fossil fuel emissions, was the biggest driver of wildfire destruction in the model.

“If fires become really extreme, our ability to contain them might break down, and we do not know yet where this point is.”

“Our results indicate there could be widespread increases in burned area even under comparatively low warming of around 1.8°C. But if we emit more, and global temperatures rise by roughly 3.6°C, we see fires become much more prevalent, especially around the Mediterranean and across much of Western and Central Europe, including areas that to date have not experienced many fires,” said Maik Billing, a researcher at PIK and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in Global Change Biology.

A global temperature rise of 3.6°C would mean fire weather would intensify “virtually all of Europe” by 2100, the scientists said.

Currently, 2.6°C of global heating is expected by the end of the century under climate policies now in place.

The researchers also examined how human action to improve fire management, including training emergency crews and improving equipment and coordination, could mitigate some damage.

“Continued improvements in fire management have the potential to reduce burned area by 92% in a 1.8°C future and 72% at roughly 3.6°C,” said PIK. “However, the authors cautioned that the results could be optimistic when it comes to the efficacy of fire management in a much warmer climate.”

Thomas Hickler, a scientist at the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research and a co-author of the study, said: “We see fire conditions are increasing, so we need to invest more... Our projections show that this can make a significant difference.”

“But if fires become really extreme, our ability to contain them might break down, and we do not know yet where this point is,” said Hickler. “The recent record fires in France clearly show that we cannot simply extrapolate from the experiences of the past.”

Billing emphasized that regardless of investments in firefighting, “if we go on a path of high emissions... we still see strong increases in burnt area.”

“Fire management,” said Billing, “cannot replace climate mitigation.”

 

NATO and the North Atlantic left: A road to nowhere

By Jana Silverman & Jaime Caro

Published 19 August, 2026

First published at Socialist Forum.

Any analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its current geopolitical role has to begin with a puzzle: Why did the institution outlive the enemy it was created to deter? Why is it still so beloved by Western liberals and neo-conservatives alike, despite the on-again, off-again grumbles by Trump and other neo-isolationists that it has become a burden for the coffers of the US Treasury? And what alternatives can socialists on both sides of the Atlantic propose in order to truly promote geopolitical stability in the face of a social, economic, political and environmental polycrisis (understood to be a situation in which “crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects”) engulfing the planet? In this article, we postulate that the North Atlantic left must advocate for a full decoupling from NATO and the social, political, and financial costs that sustaining the organization entails, and instead advocate for a vision of geopolitical security based on environmental sustainability, social equality, and democratic and inclusive multilateral frameworks that are not hegemonized by the US or any other individual neo-imperialist power.

For most of the North Atlantic liberal-left, NATO has long been part of the furniture of the international order: an institution whose particular wars might be criticized, but whose existence and indefinite expansion are taken for granted as the guarantee of a “rules-based order” or, at most, regarded with an ambivalence that never matures into opposition. The reflex is bipartisan and transatlantic. When thirty members of the US Congressional Progressive Caucus signed a letter in October 2022 gently urging the Biden administration to pair military support for Ukraine with diplomatic effort, they withdrew it within twenty-four hours under a hail of accusations of appeasement, a measure of how narrow the permissible spectrum of transatlantic debate has become. Socialists do not share that ambivalence, and cannot afford its silences. Our argument is that an European decoupling from NATO, in the military, digital, and environmental sense, looking for real independence and sovereignty is not one demand among many, but the precondition for social and ecological progress on either shore of the Atlantic.

The NATO puzzle has acquired a further layer of irony in the second Trump era. The President who muses about leaving “delinquent” allies to their fate, who has refused to rule out economic or even military coercion to annex Greenland (which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member) and who dispatched his Vice President to scold European allies from an American base on Greenlandic soil, has nonetheless declined to junk the organization. This article will address the reasons behind his strategy in the context of the current configurations of late-stage capitalism.

NATO’s original purpose

NATO, the West’s quintessential Cold War security alliance founded in 1949, which aimed to shelter key European allies from the “Soviet threat” by including them under the US’ “ nuclear umbrella,” was not discarded and deactivated as its counterpart Warsaw Pact was in 1991 (Miles 2023/2024). Instead, the Golden Years of the so-called Pax Americana that followed the disbandment of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s led to a surprisingly small decrease in military expenditure by the United States, which registered a mere –21% decline in its military budget during the period 1986–1994, as compared to a –49.5% drop in military spending in the non-NATO world (including the former Soviet Union) during the same period. During the Clinton years, NATO did not shrink or disappear, instead it expanded eastward and began a series of military interventions outside of its core area of influence: former Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN Security Council authorization, Afghanistan at the height of the post-9/11 “anti-terrorism frenzy” from 2001-2014, and Libya in 2011 far beyond its mandate, just to name a few.

Despite NATO outliving its original purpose, it began to repurpose its existence, while simultaneously revealing the purpose that it served all along, in accordance with the argument made by Panitch & Gindin in The Making of Global Capitalism (2012). According to these authors, NATO continues to be an essential part of the machinery through which the US State supervises global capitalism, with Western Europe’s ruling classes as junior partners in an imperial alliance. In this way, post-Cold War NATO has stopped acting as a guarantee of security and peace for the Western world, because it was never designed to principally function as a mutual security pact. From its founding, indeed, the alliance’s internal enemies mattered as much as its external one. NATO’s first decades were dedicated as much to insulating Western European states from their own Communist-friendly working classes (from Marshall-conditioned aid to the stay-behind networks later exposed as Operation Gladio) as about deterring the Red Army. An offensive imperial instrument can never be reformed into a defensive one, even under deeply transformed political, social, and military conjunctures.

From burden sharing to protection racket

The need for maintaining a robust NATO in the post-Cold War, increasingly multipolar world began to be seriously questioned during the first Trump administration. Trump’s insistence on economic “burden sharing” came to the forefront of NATO’s agenda by 2018, when he pushed hard for European members of the organization to pledge 4% of their annual GDP for defense expenditure (up from a 2% commitment made by the Europeans in 2014). Shocked by Trump’s abandonment of Western mutual defense grand strategy, liberal foreign policy analysts began to wring their hands at the notion of an unmoored and underfunded NATO without the capacity to defend Fortress Europe from the evils of Vladimir Putin, cast as the new post-Cold War “boogie man” (despite or perhaps because of his similarities with the former Cold War “boogie men”) by Washington establishment elites.

The complaint itself was hardly new. American elites have grumbled about European free-riding since Eisenhower complained privately that the allies were making a “sucker” of the United States. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield spent the early 1970s introducing amendments to halve US troop levels in Europe; and Robert Gates devoted his 2011 farewell address as defense secretary to warning of a “dim if not dismal” future for an alliance in which Americans paid and Europeans merely philosophized. This grumbling is a signal of imperial decay. A hegemon that has full confidence in its powers subsidizes its allies, as post-WWII Washington did, because protection purchased markets, dollar seigniorage, and political obedience at a discount. A hegemon in relative decline, however, begins to monetize its protection directly.

As part of its intentions to restore US standing in the world through rejoining global alliances and reprioritizing multilateral commitments, the incoming Biden administration “bent the stick” in the opposite direction when it came to foreign relations with Western European powers. Under Biden, the US simultaneously returned to non-contentious relations with its traditional Western European allies and reinforced claims of the “indispensableness” of NATO (not only as a military shield but also as an instrument for democracy promotion), through actively encouraging the expansion of the geographic scope of the organization. While that expansion undoubtedly was a motive behind Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, its logic went unquestioned and even celebrated by Biden who was eager to unleash both the “hard” and “soft” versions of US imperial power on the European continent. As Biden stated at a 2024 summit celebrating NATO’s 75-year anniversary, “for those who thought NATO’s time had passed, they got a rude awakening when Putin invaded Ukraine. […] Some of the oldest, deepest fears in Europe roared back to life because once again a murderous madman was on the march. But this time, no one cowered in appeasement, especially the United States.”

Now, under the second Trump administration, the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to drag on, tragically transformed into yet another forever war that is being underwritten on both sides of the Atlantic by capitalist interests linked to the military-industrial complex. It is important to say that the motivations for Trump “staying the course” in Ukraine are quite different from that of the former Biden administration. For Western liberals, Ukraine is the legitimating war — the conflict that redeemed NATO after Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. It restored the moral vocabulary of the “defense of democracy,” and made alliance politics electorally viable again. Trump’s coalition has no need of that legitimation, as it organizes consent through civilizational nationalism at home, not liberal internationalism abroad, and the fractions of capital closest to it have different balance sheets. Fossil-fuel capital eyes sanctions relief and Arctic hydrocarbons; the venture-backed tech-defense complex of Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX profits from Pacific-facing rearmament regardless of what happens in the Donbas; and the MAGA strategic imagination treats Russia as a potential junior partner in a world of great-power spheres, with China as the only rival that counts. Ukraine, in this scheme, is a European liability to be offloaded, profitably, since the offloading takes the form of European purchases of American weapons. As US foreign policy towards Europe becomes more and more unilateral and erratic the NATO burden sharing debate is now back front and center, in a context underlain by mistrust on the part of European partners and inflated imperialist bravado exhibited by Trump.

An alliance of equals?

At the June 2025 Hague summit, European NATO members adopted a target of 5 percent of GDP for defense and security spending by 2035; Spain, the only country to refuse, was answered not with coherent arguments but with Trump’s unilateral threat to make it “pay twice as much” through trade. When Madrid in March 2026 would not allow US aircraft to use the Rota and Morón bases for strikes on Iran launched outside the UN Charter, Trump ordered a full cut-off of trade with Spain. Alliances of equals do not behave this way; metropoles disciplining peripheries do. The discipline has a business model. Rosa Luxemburg called militarism a province of accumulation in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), and the description has aged well: according to figures cited in the Draghi report, 63 percent of EU defense procurement between mid-2022 and mid-2023 went to US suppliers. Rearmament on NATO’s terms is a historic transfer of European public money to American arms capital. The 5 percent target is less a strategy than a tribute schedule with a procurement funnel attached.

The Spanish alternative

The case of Spain matters analytically because it shows how resistance is possible, what this strategy depends on, and why it is domestically and internationally important. The how is documented: at The Hague, as the Spanish government secured the alliance’s only exemption, arguing NATO’s own capability targets could be met at roughly 2.1 percent of GDP. It has since dropped the F-35 in favor of European aircraft (a substitution of suppliers rather than a reduction in lethality, a distinction whose importance will become clear below) and in March it conditioned any use of Spanish territory on conformity with principles enshrined in the UN Charter.

The why is material as much as political. Politically, the governing coalition depends on left and peripheral-nationalist parties for whom rearmament carries a price — above all on Sumar, the ecosocialist coalition led by Yolanda Díaz, which formally rejected the government’s rearmament plan. Sumar instead supports a different political project, based on strategic autonomy, European independence and real sovereignty, without subordination to the United States, and security as protection of people’s social and ecological conditions of life, not weapons procurement, as the EU already outspends Russia threefold in this budget line item. Materially, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity since 2019. Due to this, by early 2026 gas became the minority source of energy domestically, equalling only 9 percent of total megawatt hours. When the war on Iran sent European gas prices surging, Spanish wholesale power averaged €42 per megawatt-hour against €143 in Italy, while heavily gas-dependent Germany absorbed the full shock. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016) traces how fossil energy systems embed class power and imperial hierarchy; the Spanish case shows the inverse. Every gigawatt of domestically owned renewables removes a lever of external coercion.

The Spanish exception should not be idealized, however. As Ekaitz Cancela has argued, the same Sánchez government that refused access by the US to the Rota and Morón bases has presided over the largest defense budget in Spanish history, mutating from the “pandemic Keynesianism” of the post-COVID recovery period to military neoliberalism. In December 2025, the Defense Ministry adjudicated €15.8 billion to private contractors to comply with NATO targets, while the State’s digital backbone was quietly handed over to Silicon Valley: SpaceX satellites for military communications, Palantir software inside the armed forces’ intelligence systems (under NATO eyes), and Microsoft software licenses for federal administrative employees. What is marketed to European electorates as “military Keynesianism”, specifically, jobs and growth through rearmament, operates in practice as military neoliberalism: public spending to prop up the private military-industrial complex. A decoupling from Washington of this type would merely Europeanize the suppliers of militarism while leaving a NATO-focused political economy intact. That is why Sumar’s position within the coalition against the rearmament plan as a whole, and not just a veto of American vendors, marks the actual dividing line regarding defense policy in the Sanchez administration.

Two sovereignties

Here conceptual precision matters: the idea of “European sovereignty” is now being invoked to support two diametrically opposed projects. What the European Commission calls strategic autonomy — the €800 billion ReArm Europe program, hastily rebranded Readiness 2030 — suspends neoliberal deficit rules for weapons purchases while leaving Europe’s deeper dependencies untouched, for example, US firms hold 85 percent of the European cloud market.

The EU spending rules are notorious for their harshness. Since the ratification of the Maastricht treaty in 1991, EU member states have been bound to keep budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP and public debt below 60 percent. After the 2008 global financial crisis, these restrictions were the building blocks of the austerity architecture that gutted Southern Europe’s health care, education, and social protection systems. In March 2025, the Commission moved to activate “national escape clauses” exempting increases in military spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP from precisely those ceilings, laying bare the real priorities of “social” Europe. These policies undermine any attempt at popular sovereignty, which would allow for budget priorities to be set on the national level in consonance with the real needs of each country’s working classes.

That is not an exit from imperialism but an application for promotion within it — and the application will not be granted. Poulantzas explained why in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1975): postwar American capital did not confront Europe from outside, as a rival across a frontier, but was replicated within European social formations themselves. In this way, a Western European capitalist class was created, that was neither a national bourgeoisie capable of an autonomous project nor a typical comprador class. Instead it was (and still is) a bourgeoisie with its own domestic base of accumulation but whose conditions of reproduction and valorization nonetheless depend on American technology, finance, and military prowess. The procurement and cloud figures are not deficiencies to be corrected by better industrial policy; they are the shape of the relation. An anti-imperialist Europe is therefore a project impossible to reproduce without dramatically transforming the inherently US-dependent nature of the modern Western European capitalist class. Sovereignty can only be reclaimed by another historical subject — the working class.

A socialist concept of sovereignty starts from a radically different focus on the well-being of peoples, not States. Popular sovereignty is inextricably linked to the concept of what Marxist feminists call social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017) — the everyday systems of energy, food, housing, care, tech and knowledge through which a society maintains its vitality. Whoever controls those systems governs, no matter what national Constitutions say; that is why popular sovereignty is built in grids and cloud infrastructure as much as in armaments and military readiness.

National and regional defense follows the same materialist logic. What principally matters is not how much is spent, but what is defended. NATO’s rearmament defends the circuits of accumulation — sub-Arctic shipping lanes, mineral extraction frontiers, capital’s investments far beyond Europe. On the other hand, a socialist concept of defense protects and uplifts the well-being of all peoples, and is therefore defined by its self-imposed limits by what it refuses to do as much as by what it protects. Where NATO doctrine is organized around the unlimited projection of “hard power,” a socialist doctrine of defense, independence and sovereignty is bounded: by the UN Charter’s absolute prohibition of wars of aggression; by the consistent application of human rights principles within and beyond Western borders, without the exemptions Washington and Brussels grant themselves; and by solidarity as an organizing principle (as expressed by energy interconnections, technology transfers, and robust protections for refugees and migrants) rather than protection rackets between States.

Using a consistent socialist logic, we should also reaffirm that Russia’s war on Ukraine is also a form of imperialist aggression, and a left that answers NATO’s imperialism by excusing Moscow’s will never find emancipatory solutions to the existential challenges faced by the working class posed by competing fractions of global capital. Those fractions can be named. On one side stands the Northern Atlantic military-industrial-fossil fuel bloc, now enhanced by a venture-backed tech-defense complex. These fractions of Western capital need permanent rearmament and therefore a permanent enemy, in order to guarantee increased profit margins. In competition with Western capital is the Russian extractive-military oligarchy, for which war has become a dual strategy to ensure capital accumulation and political survival. Who gets left behind on both sides of this transnational duel for the spoils of extraction and exploitation is the global working class, including the Ukrainian and Russian workers currently being used as cannon fodder on both sides of the battlefront. As formulated by Bah, this war is an expression of the modern “banality of oppression” suffered by the global working classes, which serves to brutally reinforce ingrained economic, social and racial injustices.

The ecological question

The ecological question is not a superfluous issue here; it provides a material base for any effective anti-war strategizing. The war economy and the fossil fuel economy are structurally fused not because the working class family heating its home with natural gas is complicit in war, but because both economies run on the same infrastructure, the same fiscal circuits, and the same premise of limitless extraction. It is undeniable that fossil fuel energy is still needed for material survival — people still cook, heat, and move with it. But this fossil fuel dependency was not inevitable. According to Malm (2016), it was engineered as a function of the current neoliberal capitalist order, and has created a form of thermodynamic and geopolitical path dependency. The US Fifth Fleet patrols the Gulf because the Carter Doctrine pledged military force in defense of hydrocarbon flows. The fiscal circuits overlap one another, petroStates recycle profits into weapons, and weapons then secure additional profits for these same States and for their imperial allies. Likewise, the world’s militaries are the fossil economy’s most voracious institutional consumers (Crawford 2022) — accounting for an estimated 5.5 percent of global emissions, a larger footprint than even Russia’s.

An ecosocialist transition starts from the opposite premise: the planet has biophysical limits, and production must be democratically planned within them. This means scaling down what is destructive for human existence, namely military and fossil fuel infrastructure first, in order to then expand what sustains life. That is the rift Marx saw opening between capital’s compulsion to grow and the natural cycles it exhausts — the ecology Saito (2023) has reconstructed from Marx’s late notebooks as degrowth communism. That transition cannot be financed from inside an arms race; a continent mobilizing €800 billion for weapons has already chosen which limits it respects. Decoupling from NATO across military, energy, and digital dimensions is therefore not a gesture but a precondition. This precondition, though, is not yet a binding program. We can perfectly imagine a unilateral exit from NATO by the Trump administration which would still keep the fossil fuel-military coupling intact under new national management. A real geopolitical transformation would transcend the issue of NATO per se, and point towards a national and transnational realignment of political values and economic priorities away from death and extraction and towards ecological sustainability and egalitarian social reproduction.

A Transatlantic horizon

The logic for an ecosocialist transition is equally applicable in Europe and in the US. As growing US defense and security expenditures are increasingly used to wage war both abroad and at home, with a hyper-militarized ICE terrorizing immigrant communities, and an emboldened CIA and Special Forces illegally kidnapping sovereign heads of state in America’s “backyard,” socialists must lead the fight against the devaluing and precarization of life on both the domestic and international fronts. DSA was right in including the abolition of NATO as a plank in its political platform approved at the 2021 Convention. And, on the other shore of the Atlantic, Sumar was right to say no to more spending in defense and to begin a process of decoupling from NATO grounded on energy sovereignty, technology and internationally-recognized human rights.

Now, as we gain organizational strength and greater political representation in both the institutional and extra-institutional spheres, DSA must take its “No to NATO” position to its next logical step, by working to build a new kind of peoples’ transnational mutual defense, based on the preservation and expansion of the global commons outside of any profit- or war-seeking logic, in conjunction with our foreign partners in networks such as the Foro de Sao Paulo (the standing conference of Latin American and Caribbean left parties and movements first convened in 1990 and of which DSA is an associate member), and Progressive International, the global coordinating body of left parties, unions, and social movements launched in 2020 of which DSA is a full member. We have a world to win, or to lose, depending on our willingness and capacity to promote popular, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist human security, in the weeks, months and years to come.

Jana Silverman is a Co-Chair of the DSA International Committee. 

Jaime Caro is a Member of the DSA International Committee and Political Advisor for Sumar (Spain).

References

Miles, Simon. 2023/2024. “We All Fall Down: The Dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the End of the Cold War in Eastern Europe,” International Security. 48(3): 51-85.

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press.

Cancela, Ekaitz. 2026. “Pedro Sánchez contra el trumpismo.” Revista Anfibia, 5 March. Extended Spanish version of “ Sanchismo’s Last Stand,” The Ideas Letter, 2026.

Crawford, Neta C. 2022. The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions. MIT Press.

Lenin, V.I. 1917. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. International Publishers.

Lundestad, Geir. 1986. “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952.” Journal of Peace Research 23(3): 263–277.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1913. The Accumulation of Capital. Routledge.

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Verso.

Saito, Kohei. 2023. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press.

 

The world is on track to warm 25% more than the official projections say

A new way of grading climate models suggests the ones scientists threw out for running too hot were the accurate ones - and that existing policies lead to 3.25C, not 2.6C. / bne IntelliNews

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By Ben Aris in Berlin August 21, 2026

The climate models that were discarded for predicting too much warming were right, and the ones the world's climate projections rest that were the basis of the Paris Agreements targets are all wrong, say scientists, backed up by the data.

The Paris Agreement cap of 1.5°C increase in temperatures goal is based on the calculations of around 20 climate model predictions coordinated by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that has formed the baseline for the last decade. But as the Climate Crisis gets underway in earnest over the last four years of what is now an annual disaster season, it is already clear that global warming is running faster than any of the models predicted. The climate model calculations are badly off.

The Climate Crisis is accelerating. The IPCC says that the Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperature increases to less than 1.5°C-2°C above the pre-industrial benchmark has already been missed and temperature increase are on course to reach a catastrophic 2.7C-3.1C by 2050. At that point extreme temperature events will become routine and large parts of the world will become uninhabitable.

A new study by a team at ETH Zurich, “Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming”, published in the journal Earth's Future, rebuilds the way climate models are graded against reality and finds that the best-performing ones project substantially more warming than the current consensus.

"For a given emission trajectory, we expect warming to be 25% higher," said Gergana Gyuleva, who led the study.

Every climate target in circulation is a temperature and every temperature comes out of these models. The Climate Action Tracker currently puts the world on course for 2.6°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 if countries do what they have already promised – which most of them are not doing. On Gyuleva's team's numbers the same policies deliver 3.25°C - which is the difference between a bad century and an unrecognisable one, produced not by any change in emissions but by a change in which models are trusted. As IntelliNews reported, if the permafrost melts in Russia and the north completely disappears, as it will at a 3°C increase above the pre-industrial baseline, that leads to catastrophic and unpredictable consequences.

How the models got graded

Climate models disagree sharply about how much the planet heats for a given amount of carbon dioxide. Some put the short-term response to a doubling of CO₂ at around 1.6°C; others at close to 3°C. "The range is big, and it really matters," said Gyuleva. "So, the point is to find out which ones are right."

The standard test has been to run the models over the recent past. Feed in the last century's greenhouse gas emissions, compare the warming the model produces against the warming that actually happened, and keep the ones that match.

For the IPPC’s last report, a lot of models simulated more warming than had been observed, so they were discounted. What survived gave a short-term response to doubled CO₂ of between 1.2°C and 2.4°C, with a best estimate of 1.8°C.

The problem with grading models against the observed record is that the observed record contains weather as well as climate. During a La Niña, cooler water from the deep ocean spreads across the surface and global temperatures dip; the reverse happens in an El Niño. None of that says anything about how sensitive the climate is to CO₂ .

Gyuleva's team filtered the historical record to strip that variability out, and found it had been pushing in one direction. Natural variability suppressed measured warming between 1981 and 2014 - a window that includes the so-called global warming hiatus of the 2000s, and the exact window the earlier model-grading papers used.

"It's really exactly this period 1981 to 2014, which was used in the previous papers, where you see the strongest bias down," said Gyuleva. "It was really bad luck."

Correcting for that alone raises the estimate of how much warming a doubling of CO₂ produces. The models were not too hot. The three decades they were being judged against were unusually cool.

Measuring the heat, not the thermometer

The team then added a second test that does not use surface temperature at all. Satellites have been measuring how much short-wave radiation from the sun enters the atmosphere – the earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) - and how much long-wave radiation leaves it. The planet's energy imbalance is the most fundamental measure of global warming there is, and one that does not care where the ocean has moved its heat this decade.

Because the satellite measurements only start in 2001, this kind of assessment has become possible only recently. How well a model reproduces the observed trends in incoming and outgoing radiation is a harder test than how well it reproduces surface temperature.

The models that best match those radiation trends project much more warming. Taking the models that perform well on both tests, the team puts the short-term response to a doubling of CO₂ at between 1.9°C and 2.6°C, with a best estimate of 2.25°C - against the IPCC's 1.8°C.

"Our results need to be confirmed by more evidence from different sources before we can be fully confident," Gyuleva said.

What other scientists make of it

The reception has been warm without being unanimous. "This seems to be a sound approach," said Trude Storelvmo at the University of Oslo. "In my opinion, the filtering out of natural variability is a valuable step forward," said Drew Shindell at Duke University in North Carolina - though he is not yet convinced the radiation trends make a good yardstick for model performance.

Steven Sherwood at the University of New South Wales in Sydney called it "a plausible conclusion and a reasonable approach", while noting the ceiling on any such exercise.

"To do a better job of this we really need better climate models," Sherwood said. "On the other hand, the steep temperature rises of the last few years are going to lead to higher estimated ranges regardless of method."

That last observation is the one that should worry policymakers most. Whichever method wins the methodological argument, the direction of revision is the same.

Europe faces a season of deluges as the Mediterranean hits 33°C

The sea has spent the summer storing heat. It comes back as rain, and Valencia and Derna are what that looks like when it does. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin August 21, 2026

The Mediterranean has spent the summer soaking up heat. That heat will comes back as rain this autumn. A lot of rain.

With the hottest summer on record, the Mediterranean has absorbed record and sea temperatures are literally off the scale – climatologists have been forced to redraw the axes of their charts to accommodate the never-seen-before results.

Heat turns into humidity. When the temperatures begin to fall in the coming months, the humidity turns into rain. Record hot seas in the summer mean record rainfall, flooding and storms in the autumn.

Sea surface temperatures across virtually the whole Mediterranean basin are far above normal, with parts of it running between 28°C and 33°C, according to measurements circulated by meteorologist JJ Gonzalez Aleman of Spain's state weather agency.

“The Mediterranean is burning,” he wrote. “And it is not a metaphor.”

The EU’s meteorological satellite service Copernicus put the anomaly across parts of the sea at as much as 6°C above the long-term average in the first half of this year, and around 82% of the world's oceans went through marine heatwave conditions over the same period.

None of that energy has gone anywhere. It sits in the water in the air until the first autumn cold intrusions arrive to squeeze it out as precipitation. Southern Europe has been on the receiving end of that exchange in successive Septembers and Octobers of what is now an annual disaster season.

On land the summer has read as drought. Record wildfires have swept France, Spain and more recently the Balkans. France reached 43°C in the fifth major heatwave of the year, with hundreds of cities under alert. Hungary has been running its energy system around a Danube at record lows, and nuclear plants there and in Romania have been forced to shut down as river temperatures rose to the point where they can’t cool the reactors.

The heatwaves have set Europe up for flash floods and worse. Baked ground is the worst possible surface for a month of heavy autumnal rain. Water runs off hardened soil instead of sinking into it, gathers in the rivers and turns a downpour into a flash flood.

However, in the short-term some relief is expected that might take the edge off a looming disaster. Most of Europe is due significant rainfall over the coming week, with 50-100 mm possible in the areas most in deficit, according to the forecaster Ventusky. That is welcome for rivers and crops, and softening ground that has been close to zero moisture for months will take some of the edge off what follows.

Russia's Far East is already showing the wet end of the same year. Severe flooding has turned the Amur around Khabarovsk into what residents are calling an inland sea, while southern Europe is still grappling with wildfires.

Seven per cent per degree

Warmer air holds more water – the rule of thumb is 7% more per 1’C of warming, under the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. The atmosphere already carries roughly 10% more water vapour than it did 30 years ago.

Extreme rainfall rises faster than the vapour itself, closer to 15% for each 1°C, because the heaviest downpours pull moisture in from a wide area rather than wringing out only what sits overhead. World Weather Attribution's read is that current warming levels alone would be expected to lift rainfall intensity by around 10%.

Heat also holds the rain back. A warmer atmosphere hangs on to moisture for longer, which stretches the gaps between rainfall and loads more water into each event when it finally breaks.

Death by deluge

The Mediterranean has already shown how deadly the summer's stored heat can be. On September 10 and 11, 2023, Storm Daniel came ashore in eastern Libya after crossing a sea left unusually warm by climate change, and dropped a day of extraordinary rain on the hills above Derna.

Two dams above the city, Abu Mansour and Wadi Derna, gave way in the night and sent a wall of water several metres high through a sleeping town. Neither had been maintained since 2011, despite maintenance contracts worth millions of dollars that were never completed. Subsidence and cracks had been found in them as far back as the early 1990s.

The Libyan Red Crescent put the dead at as high as 11,300 in Derna alone. World Weather Attribution's own count days later was 3,958 confirmed dead in the city, a further 170 elsewhere in Libya, and more than 10,000 people still missing. Divers searched the sea because bodies were being washed back onto the beaches.

“Storm Daniel is yet another lethal reminder of the catastrophic impact that a changing climate can have on our world,” said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk.

The attribution study put the rainfall at a one-in-300 to one-in-600 year event and found that something as extreme as Libya's had been made up to 50 times more likely and up to 50% more intense by a climate 1.2C warmer than the pre-industrial one. In Libya, it noted, the magnitude sat far outside anything previously recorded.

The same low-pressure system had already crossed the northern Mediterranean. Between September 4 and 7 it flooded Greece and Bulgaria, killing 17 and four respectively; seven died in Turkey and six in Spain. Greek agriculture was written off for five years or more.

Rebuilding Derna was later costed at $1.8bn. Twelve officials were jailed over the dam collapses in 2024.

A year's rain in a day

Valencia is the European version of the same event. On October 29, 2024, a year's worth of rain fell on eastern Spain in a single day and more than 230 people died.

The rain alone did not do it. Alerts reached people late; the split between regional and national authority slowed the response; and years of building on flood plain, served by an ageing drainage network, left the water nowhere to go. A city can survive the meteorology and still drown on the administration.

The ingredient Valencia needed - a sea warm enough to load the atmosphere above it - is this year present across the whole basin rather than in one corner of it.

The whole ocean is running hot

The Mediterranean is the warm corner of a warm planet rather than an outlier. July 2026 tied July 2024 as the hottest month in 176 years of record-keeping, at 1.18C above the twentieth-century average on the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's reckoning and 1.47C above pre-industrial on the Copernicus and World Meteorological Organisation numbers.

Sea surface temperatures set their own July record, running 1.02C above average - the first July past that mark - with the daily reading for the 60S-60N band closing the month at 21.05C. The Persian Gulf hit a record 36C while Iran sweltered near 50C.

Close to 40% of the world's ocean area was in a marine heatwave in June, with the hottest patches in the Mediterranean and the Pacific more than 10C above normal. The oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by burning fossil fuels, which is why their temperature is the cleanest single measure of how far the warming has run.

“Current conditions could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The Pacific is louder

The biggest signal of the year is not in the Mediterranean at all. A super El Nino arrived early and is still strengthening. Temperatures in the benchmark Nino 3.4 region of the central Pacific are already 1.8C above average and closing on the 2C mark that defines a “super” event, and NOAA puts near-certain odds on it lasting into February 2027.

Nine of ten forecast models describe a strong-to-historic event. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center puts the chance of it reaching “very strong” by the November-January peak at around 63% - the top tier of a scale reached by only a handful of events since the 1950s.

El Nino is the warm phase of a natural Pacific cycle that recurs every two to seven years and normally emerges during the northern autumn. What makes this one different is the surface it is landing on: a record-warm global ocean, with the natural cycle stacked on top of the long-term trend rather than fluctuating around a stable baseline.

Its fingerprints show up in rainfall as much as in heat. El Nino years typically bring heavier rain to California and South America and drier conditions to Australia and Southeast Asia. Hurricanes near the United States tend to be suppressed, while cyclones elsewhere come in stronger and wetter.

The food bill

Capital Economics counts three channels of disruption from an extreme El Nino year: food price inflation, lost power generation where hydro reservoirs run dry, and logistics broken up by extreme weather.

“An El Nino in the second half of the year - as seems increasingly likely - would add to the upside pressures on food and energy prices,” wrote William Jackson, the firm's chief emerging markets economist. “The macroeconomic effects would be largest in emerging markets, particularly those most sensitive to higher food prices, including India and parts of Africa, as well as those where power generation might be curtailed such as Colombia.”

Food can account for 30% or more of the consumer price basket and over a quarter of GDP in parts of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, which is where a bad harvest turns into a political problem fastest.

Soft commodities move first. Fitch Solutions expects Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa crop to come in at 1.7mn tonnes in the 2026/27 season, down 17.5% year on year, with Ghana flat at 670,000 tonnes. Smallholders dominate both, with little irrigation and no capacity to absorb an input shock.

Staples are better insulated. Wheat and corn are grown across enough geographies that a bad year in one is usually covered by another. The concentrated markets have no such cushion - cocoa, coffee, sugar and palm oil all moved sharply during the 2023-24 cycle - and neither does copper, if heavy rain interrupts mining in Chile and Peru.

Europe has spent this summer managing the drought: reservoirs down, reactors off, rivers too low to cool anything. The heat that caused it is still sitting in the sea. It has to come out somewhere, and the only thing not yet settled is which coastline is standing there when it does.

Extreme heat, drought and wildfires expose Southeast Europe's climate risks

Helicopters deployed to fight wildfires in Albania. / Agjencia Kombëtare e Mbrojtjes Civile, AlbaniaFacebook

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By IntelliNews August 21, 2026

Europe has lost 606,327 hectares to wildfire so far this year, about two and a half times the 20-year average for this point in the year, according to the  European Forest Fire Information System's own count, as drought and record heat intensify pressure on agriculture, energy systems and water supplies across the continent. Southeast Europe is at the sharp end of the crisis, with firefighters battling active blazes in counties across the region.

The fires are the most visible sign of a wider problem. Rivers are at exceptionally low levels, hydropower output is vulnerable, nuclear plants are facing constraints on cooling water and farmers are heading into harvests after a summer of heat and drought.

In just he last few days, Croatian firefighters have battled blazes that threatened the coastal town of Omiš as well as spreading across the Pelješac peninsula. The fires resulted in one death, at least 36 injuries and the evacuations of around 1,000 residents and tourists, according to government statements.

Croatia also sent firefighting helicopters to neighbouring Bosnia & Herzegovina, where a fire on Mount Risovac in the municipality of Bosansko Grahovo created a front of almost 15 km. Difficult terrain, a lack of forest roads, strong winds and thick smoke hampered efforts to contain the fire, just one of several wildfires across the country.

Albania's National Civil Protection Agency recorded 25 fires in the 24 hours to August 19. About 311 hectares had been affected. Around 350 firefighters and 26 vehicles were deployed, supported by 140 armed forces personnel, three helicopters and two Air Tractors.

In North Macedonia, a fire near Caniste in the Prilep area was moving towards Kruzevica on August 19, with about 30 volunteers working to slow its advance. Stojance Angelov, head of the Directorate for Protection and Rescue, said the length of the fire front meant it could not realistically be extinguished quickly.

The scale of this year's fire season puts the individual emergencies into a wider European context.

By August 18, 606,327 hectares had burned in 1,736 fires across Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System. The 2006-2025 average for the same date was 243,189 hectares.

That makes 2026 the second-worst year on record, behind 2025, when 957,510 hectares had burned. The two worst fire seasons in the record have therefore come consecutively.

Water under pressure

Extremely low water levels on the Danube have affected power generation and transport along the length of the river in Central and Southeast Europe.

Low water levels have reduced the amount of cargo that barges can carry and affected irrigation intakes along the river basin. The Danube is also an important source of cooling water for power plants, meaning low levels can create direct risks for electricity generation.

Reactors in Hungary and Romania have already faced interruptions linked to the drought, while Hungary launched an emergency water-control project to maintain sufficient flows for the Paks nuclear power plant.

The problem is also acute for countries that rely heavily on hydropower. Albania's electricity system has traditionally benefited from abundant hydropower resources, helping to shield the economy from external energy shocks. But the same lack of rainfall that is worsening fire conditions is putting pressure on reservoirs and future generation.

The retreating waters have also exposed remnants of the past, including scuttled German warships near Prahovo in Serbia, the wreck of Budapest's Franz Joseph bridge, the foundations of a Roman crossing near Gigen in Bulgaria and Ice Age mammoth bones near Ruse.

Economic cost rises

Scientists say the conditions are consistent with a broader shift in Europe's climate. The IPCC has Europe's heat map turning red as heatwaves become annual rather than exceptional, and the continent is warming faster than any other. This is the pattern our own disaster season coverage has been mapping since 2022.

Allianz Trade estimates that cumulative GDP losses in the most exposed European economies could reach 5-7% by 2030. It estimates losses of $240bn for France, $147bn for Italy, $131bn for Germany and $120bn for Spain.

Labour productivity falls by about 3% for every additional degree above 30 degrees Celsius, while energy demand rises by about 1.2%, according to the analysis. That creates a damaging combination for businesses: workers are less productive as temperatures rise while demand for cooling increases.

European governments have increasingly recognised the need for climate adaptation. Many countries have adaptation strategies, yet governments often rely on emergency spending after disasters rather than investing sufficiently in measures designed to prevent or limit damage. That is a poor fit for a region where cooling is becoming existential rather than a comfort, and where heat mortality is already climbing. For Southeast Europe, where governments have already been increasing disaster-response allocations, the challenge is particularly acute.

Food prices next

Agriculture is one of the main channels through which drought and extreme heat can spread into the wider economy. European harvests have been affected by the exceptionally hot summer, raising concerns about yields and commodity prices.

Capital Economics expects higher global agricultural prices to begin pushing headline inflation higher again in Central and Eastern Europe in the coming months, reversing some of the food-price declines that have supported household purchasing power.

Input costs are also a concern. Fertiliser prices have risen following the new Iran war, adding another source of pressure for farmers.

The impact of climate extremes is not new to the region. In 2023, heatwaves followed by severe storms damaged maize, sunflower and fruit crops across Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria, after drought had already reduced yields. The sequence of drought, fire, storms and crop losses is becoming less of an exceptional agricultural shock and more of a recurring pattern.

The deterioration can be seen by comparing recent summers. In 2022, firefighters battled wildfires across Southeast Europe as a heatwave moved east, while Albania's first major fire of that year burned for days on Sazan Island.

In 2026 Hungary recorded its hottest day ever, Europe's June heatwave was the most severe on record, and a Super El Nino arrived early. 

The result is a growing chain of interconnected risks. Wildfires consume forests and threaten homes and infrastructure. Drought reduces river flows, restricts transport and irrigation and can threaten power generation. Heat reduces labour productivity while increasing demand for electricity. Poor harvests raise food prices, while farmers face higher input costs.

The immediate task remains putting out the fires. The longer-term challenge is adapting economies, infrastructure and agriculture to conditions that increasingly look less like temporary emergencies and more like the operating environment of the future.

Marmolada, shrinking ice and weaker permafrost: 'Dolomites under strain'

Copyright Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

By Stefania De Michele with Ansa

Published on 21/08/2026 -  EURONEWS

Marmolada glacier in retreat, permafrost deteriorating and high-altitude water dwindling: Legambiente warns of a crisis in the Venetian Dolomites

Marmolada is losing ice, the mountains are becoming more unstable and water at high altitude is no longer a given. That is the picture painted by Legambiente Veneto for the seventh edition of the Glacier Caravan, the international campaign that sets off from France and once again shines a spotlight on the ever faster transformation of the Alps.

Climate change in the Dolomites is no longer just a matter of landscape. What is worrying are the knock-on effects: glacier retreat, degradation of permafrost, increased slope instability and shrinking water reserves available in summer.

Marmolada, an increasingly fragile glacier

Marmolada, together with Adamello and Mont Blanc, is for Legambiente one of the emblematic cases of the fragility of the Alpine arc. Driven by the heatwaves of recent weeks, the glacier continues to lose mass.

The ice now appears grey and deeply scored by meltwater streams, while its perimeter keeps shrinking. An image that starkly illustrates a transformation which, year after year, is changing the face of the mountains.

Climate data help to sketch a particularly critical picture. In Veneto, in June 2026, temperatures were more than 3 degrees above the 1991-2020 average. In July, the heat was exceptional especially at altitude, with the freezing level rising above 4,000 metres.

Permafrost is thawing and slopes are becoming more unstable

It is not only the loss of ice that is cause for concern. Warming at high elevations is also affecting permafrost, the ground that stays frozen for very long periods and helps hold the slopes together.

On Piz Boè, according to the Arpav report updated to 31 July, the active layer has exceeded 7.4 metres in depth. The figure does not directly describe conditions in the Dolomites of Belluno, but for Legambiente it is an important signal of a phenomenon that should be monitored far more widely.

The association is therefore calling for monitoring to be extended to the Pelmo, Antelao, Sorapiss, Civetta and Tofane massifs, especially in the light of recent rockfalls recorded on Pelmo's north-west face.

According to the figures cited by Legambiente, the province of Belluno has to contend every year with 150-200 collapses and landslides. A number that gives a sense of the pressure the slopes are under.

Water is part of the problem too

The glacier crisis does not affect only the mountains themselves. Retreating ice is also likely to impact water availability during the summer months, affecting aquifers and reservoirs.

Alpine huts are feeling the effects too. High-altitude water, Legambiente explains, can no longer be taken for granted. This is why the province of Belluno and CAI Veneto have launched a specific protocol to tackle the issue of water supply in mountain refuges.

It is one of the less visible but more concrete effects of the changing Alpine climate: the mountain is changing, and with it the conditions are changing for those who live there, visit it and work there.

"The Dolomites are not just a postcard backdrop"

In the face of this scenario, Legambiente Veneto is calling on the Veneto regional authorities to speed up approval of the Regional Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change, launched in 2021 but still awaiting final adoption.

"The Veneto Dolomites are not just a postcard backdrop, but a living system that is changing faster than public planning can keep up with," stresses Fabio Tullio, spokesperson for the Glacier Caravan in Veneto.

The campaign's message is therefore clear: it is not enough to watch the ice disappear. Slopes need to be monitored, the impact on water availability anticipated and the mountains prepared to cope with a climate that is already changing.

In this sense, Marmolada is far more than a retreating glacier: it is one of the clearest signs of how fast the Alpine environment is changing.

This text was translated with the help of artificial intelligence and originally published in Italian