European Union: According to French officials, there were signs of a "summer apocalypse" in Western Europe. According to the French Interior Ministry, more than 15,000 people were evacuated from their homes in France due to the fierce forest fires. In the United Kingdom, airport runways melted and concerns about steel track buckling slowed the trains.

Several wildfires were triggered as a result of temperatures reaching 115 °C (46 °C) in some parts of the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain and Portugal, more than a thousand people are expected to die in the last one week due to the heat. Apart from dealing with the recent surge in coronavirus cases. hospitals are already under stress from this additional burden. Hydrologists are warning of more dire consequences of widespread drought, falling water levels and damaged crops.

Centre-left politicians blame the hot wave on climate change. Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Costa declared that his country "has no time to waste" and advocated increased investment in renewable energy. On Monday, the drought and wildfire-ravaged Extremadura was visited by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Clearly, climate change causes death, he declared. It destroys biodiversity, our ecosystem and people.

UK According to Nikos Christidis, a climate attribution specialist at the Met Office, "the chances of seeing a 40 °C [104 °] day in the UK could be 10 times greater in the current climate than in a natural climate unaffected by human activity." Even with current targets on emissions reduction, such extremes could happen every 15 years in the 2100 climate. "The likelihood of this happening anywhere above 40 °C anywhere in the UK in a given year is also increasing rapidly," the report continued.

In Britain, my colleague William Booth writes that "extraordinary temperatures have not been experienced since the beginning of modern record-keeping a century and a half ago." For British climate scientists, reaching 40 degrees Celsius is akin to a unicorn event, which was predicted in their simulations, but until recently, seemed almost impossible and unbelievable.

Nevertheless, more urgent forces are pushing governments in the opposite direction, despite the fact that European scientists and policy makers are aware of the need to adapt in the face of an impending planetary disaster. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in soaring electricity prices across the continent and harsh Western sanctions on Russian fossil fuels, exposed some countries to excessive reliance on Russian natural gas and oil to run their economies.

In a region of the world where air conditioning is not as common as in the United States, the advent of intensely hot weather has given rise to new demands. Spanish utility provider Enagas said in a statement last week that "this massive increase in demand for natural gas for electricity generation is primarily due to the higher temperatures recorded as a result of the heatwave."

Countries in Northern Hemisphere swelter in severe heat

Deadly wildfire spread in the Mediterranean during Europe's heat wave

People are evacuated as a blazing heatwave in Europe started wildfires