Three months without reaching for a woolly jumper – now that’s what you call a summer. Temperatures have been in the balmy 20s in Ireland more often than not since May. Flying insects have returned to splatter car windscreens. The sand is back in the sandwiches. The sea is as warm as a baby’s bath. Sheep’s Head is the new Riviera, and Roscommon has turned into an outdoor sauna. Summer 2025 is already the stuff of nostalgia.
Elsewhere in Europe, it is the stuff of nightmares. An estimated 2,300 deaths in 12 European cities in just 10 days in June have been attributed to intense heat. An acreage of land equating to nearly half a million football fields has been destroyed by wildfires in Spain. In Turkey, 50,000 residents were evacuated from Izmir, where fires took the lives of three people. The map of Europe evoked a vision of Dante’s Inferno at the start of August as flames swept across Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania.
The Eiffel Tower was closed in Paris for three days due to the heat. In Athens, outdoor work was forbidden after midday. Nuclear reactors had to be shut down in Switzerland to stop the water overheating in a Rhine tributary river. London Underground’s tracks sizzled at 30 degrees in the first of four summer heatwaves. Power outages, internet failures and drought on the Continent have disrupted public transport, hospital surgeries and financial services.
As summer prepares to depart this island, it is tempting to hope for more of the same next year, but other Europeans are dreading it and planning for even worse extremes to come. Scientists have said climate change is warming Europe twice as fast as the global average. In France, where the mercury surpassed 41 degrees on July 1st, air-conditioned state buildings were kept open at night for citizens to cool down, admission charges were cancelled at municipal swimming pools, and machines were installed to spray mist on to the streets. Now the authorities in Paris are bracing for 50-degree heatwaves.
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Already, 15,000 new trees have been planted in asphalt parking spaces and along the centre of roads to provide natural air conditioning, and plans are afoot for schools to double as cooling shelters. The Lancet medical publication has identified residents of Paris – the densely populated City of Light with its preponderance of ancient zinc rooftops – as the most exposed to heat-related deaths in Europe. Experts have warned the city’s planners that 50 degrees could arrive as soon as 2050.
[ Why isn’t the message on climate change getting through?Opens in new window ]
“It’s a race against time,” the New York Times quoted a city councillor, Alexandre Florentin.
But what this summer may be telling us is that the race is already lost. The damage is done.
Ten years ago, the aptly named Paris Agreement on climate change, which is legally binding, required its 195 signatory countries to pursue efforts to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. To achieve that, greenhouse gas emissions had to plateau by the start of this year and decrease by 43 per cent by 2030. The 1.5 degree threshold was exceeded last year, the hottest on Earth since at least 1850, with an average rise of 1.6 degrees. Not only is the air warming, the sea is too. According to Met Éireann, a 2.2 degree rise in temperature was recorded in the Atlantic off the Cork coast this May, constituting a marine heatwave.
Evidence abounds that climate change is out of control. Coral is being bleached in the over-heated waters of the Great Barrier Reef and the Caribbean. Glaciers are melting faster than the direst predictions forecast that they would, losing as much ice in a single year as the amount of water the entire planet consumes over 30 years, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service. Permafrost is thawing in Alaska, Siberia and Greenland. The Union of Concerned Scientists says increased deposits of carbon dioxide are making the seas more acidic and endangering marine life.
The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and the Climate Change Advisory Council have warned that this country is facing potential EU penalties of up to €26 billion for failing to sufficiently reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The prospects are bleak as the population is set to reach 5.5 million by year’s end and the economy is going full pelt, driven by electricity-voracious technology and data centres.
The extraction and burning of fossil fuels is the biggest culprit for global warming, oil being public enemy number one. Ireland is lucky to occupy a windy spot on the globe where harnessing its clean energy can generate about a third of the country’s power consumption needs. Sunlight is a complementary source, as demonstrated by the opening this week in Timahoe, Co Kildare of the first large-scale solar farm by the ESB and BnM, formerly known as Bord na Móna. Simultaneously, work has begun on building an interconnector between Ireland and France.
[ Extreme heat breaks temperature records across EuropeOpens in new window ]
As the evenings shorten, greetings are switching from “great weather” to “let’s hope we don’t pay for it in the winter”. But it is not one lovely summer that will exact the price of climate chaos. EU toadying has got there first.
In July, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen struck a deal with Donald Trump in Scotland whereby the bloc of 27 European countries is obliged to import $750 billion (€643.4 billion) worth of energy products, including oil and gas, over three years from the US in return for a 15 per cent cut in Trump’s threatened and extortionate tariffs. Stock market prices for oil companies shot up the next morning. One of Trump’s first measures on returning to the Oval Office was to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, having won the presidential election with such inspiring soundbites as “drill, baby, drill”.
Watching the ink dry on the EU-US deal, Europeans could be forgiven for wondering what is the point of traipsing to the bottle bank or agonising over their e-car’s range when global leaders play Monopoly with the planet’s future. This country’s temperate climate has insulated it against the biblical death and destruction wreaked across Europe, but it is not immune. One nice summer does not Arcadia make, no more than a single swallow can make a summer.
In the hands of profit-crazed world leaders, nowhere will be safe. That’s the message in the bottle washed ashore this summer.
