Barren, salt-damaged soil in a sunflower field in Scardovari, north-east Italy. Low water levels and prolonged hot, dry conditions in the Po delta are threatening irrigation supplies and crops. Photograph: Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu/Getty Images
Analysis shows how heatwaves are making atmosphere thirstier, damaging water supplies, food production and power generation
Extreme heat supercharged by the climate crisis is sucking Europe dry in summer and intensifying the drought hitting the continent, a scientific analysis has found.
Record-breaking heatwaves meant the hot atmosphere strongly evaporated water from rivers, lakes, soils and plants – conditions made 80 times more likely by global heating in western Europe and 40 times more likely in eastern Europe, the study showed. The level of soil dryness in the west was made five times more likely by the pollution from fossil fuels in the west, and 11 times more likely in the east.
Droughts have usually been linked to low rainfall, but western Europe’s most recent winter was a wet one. The scientists said the climate crisis was redefining drought in Europe, with high temperatures the key factor this summer. Today’s drought in western Europe is classified as “extreme” but would have been “moderate” in the world before the climate crisis, according to the analysis.
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Deadly wildfires have raged through Spain and France and farmers have been hit hard, facing some of the driest soils on record. About 9m tonnes of grain are expected to be lost across Europe, with the worst maize harvest in 50 years expected in France, and Romanian farmers losing over a million hectares of crops.
Rivers are running low across Europe, cutting the generation of clean hydropower and restricting cargo ships. The Rhine at Lobith in the Netherlands is now lower than the minimum level seen in the hot summer of 1976. The scientists warned that this disruption could push up the price of food and energy, hitting low-income households hardest.
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Nigel Farage explains that he’s called another byelection in Clacton-on-Sea because he should be able to secretly enrich himself without scrutiny and accountabilty and that the rules shouldn’t apply to him.
The Reform leader pocketed major sums from second jobs and donor gifts.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage amassed £2.3 million in income and gifts during his first two years in Parliament, DeSmog can report.
On 7 July, Farage announced that he would be resigning as Clacton’s MP in order to trigger a by-election. The Reform leader has been under investigation by Parliament’s standards commissioner over the £5 million undeclared gift that he accepted from billionaire crypto investor Christopher Harborne, the party’s biggest donor, before the 2024 general election.
DeSmog’s calculations indicate that, during his two years as Clacton’s MP, he accepted more than £2.3 million in external income and gifts, including over £720,000 from the right-wing broadcaster GB News, and more than £770,000 from the metals trading company Gold Bullion. That’s equivalent to £3,151 a day, or £22,000 a week.
Farage’s declaration of interests also shows that he received at least £85,000 in gifts from Harborne, as well as more than £39,000 from convicted fraudster George Cottrell, who also gave undeclared gifts and support to Farage in the year prior to the 2024 election.
The £2.3 million received by Farage has been on top of his roughly £98,000-a-year public salary. DeSmog revealed last week that Farage has only mentioned Clacton twice in Parliament during the past year.
“The government urgently needs to impose tougher limits on MPs’ second jobs,” Kamila Kingstone, a senior campaign lead at Spotlight on Corruption, previously told DeSmog, “so that the public can be confident that their representatives are working in the public interest rather than to line their own pockets.”
Farage’s plan to reset the narrative by forcing a by-election – his attempt to prove that voters are on his side – appears to have backfired. All the major parties have withdrawn from the contest, leaving the Reform leader to fight the by-election against Count Binface, a comedian dressed as a space-travelling bin.
Public concern over the gifts Farage has received from donors also appears to be growing. New polling from YouGov found that 40 percent of Reform’s own voters see Farage as sleazy, matched by 73 percent of the public as a whole.
Public First polling also shows that 44 percent of voters disagree with Farage that he is a victim of the political establishment, compared to 28 percent who believe he is.
“Nigel Farage is a multi-millionaire who is out for himself and working for the interests of his super-rich friends,” a Green Party spokesperson previously told DeSmog. “His whole career has been focused on personal gain and public division.”
DeSmog revealed in April that over 70 percent of Farage’s personal benefactors are based abroad – including Harborne, the Thailand-based crypto investor who has gifted flights and accommodation to Farage worth £85,453 since July 2024.
Meanwhile, Reform’s policy positions seem to align closely with the interests of its donors.
Farage has lobbied against regulation of the crypto industry, promising a UK “crypto revolution” if he becomes prime minister, and has shares in digital treasury company Stack BTC. He is due to speak at a crypto-backed conference this week, despite the furore over his gifts from crypto billionaires.
As revealed by DeSmog, Reform has also accepted £24 million from oil and gas interests while denying basic climate science and advocating for the dramatic expansion of fossil fuel production.
The government is currently considering how to reform the political finance system to limit the influence of major donors on UK democracy, with a growing number of MPs calling for a cap on the amount that can be donated by any one individual or organisation. Reform has been lobbying for the rules to remain the same.
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In Greater London, the number of days over 30C and nights over 18C more than quadrupled in the last decade, compared with 1961-1990. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Image
Annual State of the UK Climate analysis finds last four years in UK are in top five hottest on record
The UK’s climatic extremes are becoming increasingly normal, a report has found, with last year the hottest on record and further “unprecedented changes” likely to break the record again soon.
Data stretching back to 1884 shows the UK has never experienced a year as hot as 2025, according to the annual State of the UK Climate report, with temperatures pushed to dizzying heights by carbon pollution clogging the atmosphere.
Average temperatures have increased across most of the UK
The country experienced its warmest spring and summer on record last year, while England was hit by its driest spring in a century.
The report comes as the UK faces the third deadly heatwave to have scorched Europe over the last two months. On Tuesday, the Met Office said the UK had already recorded as many 30C (86F) days in 2026 as in the extraordinarily hot year of 1976.
“What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal,” said Mike Kendon, a scientist at the National Climate Information Centre and lead author of the report. “We are seeing unprecedented changes continuing … and every year adds to this body of evidence.”
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A farming storage area is flooded in Taiwan — events such as this will become more frequent in an increasingly erratic climate. Credit: Cheng Chia Huang/Getty
Increasing instability of the ocean, ice and atmosphere threatens farming, finance and society. We all need to wake up to that fact.
How we get there — how the tipping unfolds — is more important, and there is an urgent need to understand the process. This is missing from current analyses because the scales in time and space it occurs on fall between those of climate and weather. Tipping analyses focus on huge climate changes, often globally, over decades. Weather events are fast and local. But look at the interplay between the two and it’s clear that the transition between one climate state and another is not smooth but extremely volatile.
Climate tipping, therefore, will manifest as a period of increasingly dramatic weather volatility, rather than a sharp shift in average conditions. A fluctuating climate will bring swings and crashes in crop yields, flash flooding and erratic storms. It will stress economies by disrupting supply chains and amplifying insurance losses. Societies are unprepared, because weather volatility related to tipping points is absent from risk assessments.
This problem is urgent. Earth subsystems, including oceans, the cryosphere and biosphere, already seem to be destabilizing. The planet is heading for climate free fall.
Climate is destabilizing
By definition3, tipping points are reached when a series of interlinked changes amplify one another until the whole system becomes unstable and shifts uncontrollably into a different state. Loss of sea ice at the poles, for example, reduces the amount of sunlight reflected into space, further heating Earth’s surface, which then accelerates ice loss. These vicious cycles of change define a tipping point, at which the climate cannot return to its former patterns.Are we all doomed? How to cope with the daunting uncertainties of climate change
Before that point, the climate system becomes increasingly unstable. It fluctuates considerably — a rise in variability is a well-established property of such ‘non-linear dynamical systems’ approaching a critical threshold4,5. That society will face these fluctuations and that they will intensify through the tipping transition hasn’t been realized by scientists and policymakers, so far.
Earth will experience an increasingly erratic climate: more and stronger fluctuations in flows of melt water, ocean circulations and the extent of sea ice. These changes will lead to more frequent and intense extremes in temperature, precipitation and storms — leading not only to more heatwaves and droughts, but also to more cold spells and floods.
The scale of the consequences might not be obvious at first — ice sheets and ocean currents are so large that their responses to warming are relatively slow and delayed. Once a critical temperature threshold for instability is crossed, it takes time for such systems to collapse, but the collapse is inevitable (see ‘Tipping into trouble’).
Source: A. Levermann
Ice sheets in West Antarctica6 and Greenland7 have already passed their tipping temperature. Arctic sea ice will do so in a few years. For the Atlantic Ocean, scientists simply don’t know8. The period between passing the tipping temperature and reaching the tipping point is when fluctuations increase dramatically.
Research into early warning of tipping points has identified increased climate variability as a signal of reduced stability and used it to estimate the time remaining before widespread tipping begins. But variability caused by instability as a mechanism of climate impact has been widely neglected.
Modern economies are adapted to relatively stable climatic baselines. Agricultural productivity, infrastructure design, insurance pricing and financial risk management all rely not only on expected mean conditions but also on the predictability of variability.
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