Extreme heat is breaking temperature records across Europe, early measurements suggest, and driving bigger and stronger wildfires.
In southwest France, records were broken on Monday in Angoulême, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion and Saint-Girons. Météo France said the “often remarkable, even unprecedented, maximum temperatures” in the region were 12 degrees above the norm for the past few decades.
In Croatia, air temperature records were set in Šibenik, at 39.5 degrees, and Dubrovnik, at 38.9 degrees, while large forest fires raged along its coasts and ripped through neighbouring countries in the Balkans.
Beyond Europe, dozens of temperature records were broken across Canada, and record-breaking heat above 50 degrees in Iraq was blamed for a nationwide power blackout.
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The heatwave in southern Europe comes as Nordic countries recover from unprecedented temperatures above 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle this month.
Bob Ward, a policy director at London-based Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said: “This summer, like every summer now, has been exceptional in terms of extreme heat around the world.”
In Italy, where 16 of 27 major cities were placed under red heat alerts and a four-year-old boy died of heatstroke, and in Spain, where a man died in a wildfire, the high heat did not break a large number of records but still rang alarm bells.
“The main characteristic [of the heatwave] is the length and extent rather than the intensity,” said José Camacho, a climate scientist and spokesperson for Aemet, the Spanish weather agency. “But the temperatures are still very high.”
In the southwest of France, 40 per cent of a sample of weather stations recorded temperatures above 40 degrees on Monday. Lauriane Batté, a climate scientist at Météo France, said it was too soon to say if records were being “shattered” rather than simply broken, but said the geographic extent of the heat was significant.
“Unfortunately, it’s to be expected,” she said, adding that more than half of the 51 heatwaves in France since 1947 had occurred in the past 15 years. “Clearly, it’s a sign that the climate is warming.”
[ Heatwave in Europe: Wildfires force evacuation of 6,000 in SpainOpens in new window ]
The hot weather across Europe has dried out vegetation and allowed wildfires to spread further, in what scientists have described as a “Molotov cocktail” of climatic conditions. EU fire scientists projected “extreme to very extreme conditions” across the entire Continent this week, with “particularly severe” risks in much of southern Europe and high anomalies expected in parts of the Nordics.
Wildfires in Europe have burned more than 400,000 hectares so far this year, according to data published on Tuesday, which is 87 per cent more than the average for this time of year over the last two decades.
High heat kills tens of thousands of people in Europe each year. Researchers estimate that dangerous temperatures in Europe will kill 8,000 to 80,000 more people a year by the end of the century as the lives lost to stronger heat outpace those saved from milder cold weather.
Last week, the World Meteorological Organization said wildfires and poor air quality were compounding the negative health effects of extreme heat. It noted that temperatures during the first week of August reached more than 42 degrees in parts of west Asia, southern central Asia, most of North Africa, southern Pakistan, and the southwest US, with local areas exceeding 45 degrees.
“This is what climate change looks like,” Ward said. “And it will only get worse.” – Guardian
