This summer, record wildfires have raged across Europe, burning more than a million hectares of land and forcing people to evacuate their homes. A five-day stretch of extreme heat killed hundreds of people. Spain baked through its most intense heat wave on record, and the United Kingdom is all but certain to have seen its hottest summer ever.
In Europe, which has warmed about twice as fast as the global average, climate change has begun to force difficult questions about the economic and cultural costs of adapting to a dangerously warming planet.
Hotter summers are reshaping Europe’s tourism industry, prompting cities to plan for days of asphalt-melting heat, and sparking national debates about the use of air conditioning. Wildfires have added to the summer’s health risks.
At the same time, this summer’s overall temperatures across the region were “normal-ish,” according to Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union monitoring agency.
Calling the season a “double story,” Buontempo said, “It has not been as extreme as recent summers as a whole, but then you had these absolutely freakish events happening,” referring to the heat waves and fires.
Deadly heat waves
A five-day period of extreme heat in late June and early July resulted in 2,300 heat-related deaths across 12 European cities, according to an early statistical estimate by scientists at World Weather Attribution. Their analysis found that the influence of climate change may have tripled the death toll.
“We often talk about heat waves as being the silent killer because you do get these excess deaths that are not necessarily visible,” said Clair Barnes, a research associate with World Weather Attribution. She added that heat-related deaths are frequently not recorded as such.
Heat waves this summer shuttered the top of the Eiffel Tower and prompted Italy to ban outdoor work during the hottest parts of the day. European businesses reported lower foot traffic as people avoided venturing outside. In Switzerland and France, nuclear reactors were shut down after the rivers they relied on to cool their facilities heated up.
In Finland and Norway, a relentless heat wave drove reindeer from the countryside into the towns, seeking water and relief from mosquitoes.
A new wildfire era
Hot and dry conditions have meant that wildfires have spread rapidly in Spain, France, Greece and Portugal over the last few months.
The active wildfire season put a strain on local resources. Spain called in support from the military to help battle the blazes.
“One of the things that we’re seeing now is there are so many fires simultaneously that people can’t necessarily call on neighboring countries or neighboring regions to help out when they have a big fire, because they’re happening simultaneously, and that really compounds the impact,” Barnes said.
Smoke from the fires has drifted hundreds of miles, resulting in degraded air quality far from the source. The combination of extreme heat and pollution can have an outsize impact on public health.
“There have been a number of situations where the quality of the air, even far away from the fire, was so significantly impacted that people believed that the fire was in their neighborhood, even if the fire was 200, 300, 600 kilometers away,” Buontempo said.
Staying cool
The summer’s heat stirred up arguments about the best ways to keep European cities cool. In many European countries, fewer than half of households have air-conditioning.
In France, Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, called for a mass air-conditioning rollout. The leader of the France’s Green Party balked at the idea and argued in favor of improving energy efficiency and “greening” cities.
In July, the Financial Times published data suggesting that the low use of air-conditioning across the continent has meant that four times as many Western Europeans died between 2000 and 2019 as a result of extreme heat than North Americans.
Elsewhere, high electricity prices are forcing residents to find other ways to adapt. In Britain, some are exploring options like improving insulation or planting trees to shade their rooftops. In other countries, residents are experimenting with reflective paint, white stone facades, and heavy shutters.
More than half of European cities now have a dedicated climate change adaptation plan, Buontempo said. “Adaptation, contrary to mitigation, can be tackled effectively at the local level,” he said.
Forever chemicals
An industry insider’s changes at the E.P.A. could cost taxpayers billions
Early this year, Steven Cook was a lawyer representing chemical companies suing to block a new rule forcing them to clean up pollution from “forever chemicals,” which are linked to low birthrates and cancer.
Now Cook is in a senior role at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he has proposed scrapping the same rule that his former clients were challenging in court. His effort could shift cleanup costs away from polluters and onto taxpayers, according to internal E.P.A. documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Last month Cook met with industry groups that are still challenging the rule in court. By the next business day, the E.P.A. office that oversees toxic cleanups had reversed its internal recommendation on the rule, the documents show, to advise repealing it instead of upholding it. — Hiroko Tabuchi
And read more of our reporting on “forever chemicals”:
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Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals.
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In a First, the E.P.A. Warns of ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Sludge Fertilizer.
Climate politics
Trump tries to strong-arm nations to retreat on climate goals
President Trump is not only working to stop a transition away from fossil fuels in the United States, he is pressuring other countries to relax their pledges to fight climate change and instead burn more oil, gas and coal.
Trump is applying tariffs, levies and other mechanisms of the world’s largest economy to induce other countries to burn more fossil fuels. His animus is particularly focused on the wind industry, which is a well-established and growing source of electricity in several European countries as well as in China and Brazil.
Two weeks ago, the administration promised to punish countries — by applying tariffs, visa restrictions and port fees — that vote for a global agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the shipping sector. — Lisa Friedman
One Big Number
1 trillion microbial cells
Earlier this month, a team of scientists published the most comprehensive study yet of the microbiomes living inside tree trunks. Their findings suggest that the woody tissues of trees contain a trillion microbial cells above and beyond actual tree cells; communities of bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea that have specialized their existence to different parts of the tree and even to individual tree species.
The study’s results, published in the journal Nature, reveal a vast and largely unexplored reservoir of microbial diversity. “A tree individual is sort of a complex ecosystem in and of itself,” said Jonathan Gewirtzman, an ecosystem ecologist at Yale and an author of the study. — Alexa Robles-Gil
More climate news from around the web:
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China and India accounted for 87 percent of new coal capacity added across the world this year, according to a new estimate from Carbon Brief.
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After the Los Angeles fires, Berkeley moved quickly to require ember-resistant zones for high-risk homes after years of delay by the state, Bloomberg reports.
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After the worst flooding in four decades, Pakistan has evacuated more than a million people from their homes in the Punjab Province, Reuters reports.
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Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
The post Climate Change Is Transforming Summer in Europe appeared first on New York Times.
