A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
FRANCE holds emergency meetings on the evacuation of Bordeaux, a city of a million, as wildfires sweep ever closer. In Spain families are fleeing the capital, Madrid.
The reality of the climate emergency has come to Europe. There were plenty of warning signs — more severe heatwaves by the year, droughts and floods devastating harvests — including in Britain, where three of the five worst harvests on record have been since 2020 — and worsening wildfires.
In Britain this summer fires have burnt swathes of the Cairngorms and Eryri (Snowdonia), as well as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh for the second year running. As summer heatwaves grow longer and drier, we should not imagine our towns and cities are safe. As Fire Brigades Union leader Steve Wright told the Morning Star in May, “In London a suburban street burnt to the ground last year” (in Rainham) “and we had wildfires in Dorset and Wiltshire.”
Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, argues that addressing the climate crisis requires “World War II-scale mobilisation.”
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Addressing the climate crisis involves radical restructuring — one reason climate activists were, even before Palestine solidarity campaigners, the victims of repressive new anti-protest laws.
That, in turn, means getting real about the class power of the forces blocking change. Proposed mechanisms for delivering action like citizens’ assemblies are a response to the sluggishness of existing institutions, but do not address its cause — the power of the capitalist class.
Agreeing what we ought to do doesn’t guarantee that it will happen: the climate movement needs to be one with the labour and peace movements, and recognise that this is fundamentally a class struggle and a battle against capitalism itself.
That dividing line becomes ever clearer, domestically and internationally.
The far right are the climate deniers at home; globally the denier-in-chief is the main imperialist power, the United States, whose agenda is to stop the rise of China, the world leader in renewables and green tech. The only existential threat as grave as climate change is world war — and the push towards that is also the biggest obstacle to climate action.
The cry on climate demos — “system change, not climate change” — rings true. We need to follow through on the implications.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
A French firefighter responds to a flare-up to prevent the fire from reigniting in the Fontainebleau Forest, in Noisy-sur-Ecole, France. Photograph: Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP/Getty Images
Figures come as large parts of southern Europe endure another record-breaking period of extreme temperatures
France recorded more than 5,700 excess deaths during its June heatwave, authorities have said, as swathes of southern Europe continue to endure another record-breaking period of extreme temperatures.
The French national health agency said on Wednesday that it had recorded 5,764 excess deaths between 17 June and 2 July, an excess mortality rate of 36%.
More than half of the “unprecedented” total were recorded between 25 and 27 June, with deaths of people aged 75 and older accounting for about two-thirds of the excess mortality, the agency said.
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The announcement came as firefighters in Spain battled one of the country’s largest ever wildfires, which has burned about 32,000 hectares (79,000 acres) in the Guadalajara region north of Madrid, forcing the evacuation of 1,200 people from 34 villages in the sparsely populated area and confinement orders in 14 others.
Authorities said on Wednesday that the fire was beginning to stabilise, and residents of five villages were allowed to return home. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said on a visit to the area that Spain had already suffered 22 major wildfires so far this year, four times more than in the same period last year.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
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.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
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French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot gives a speech in Brussels, Belgium, on February 23, 2026. [Dursun Aydemir – Anadolu Agency]
France is calling for the EU to stop importing products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on Monday, Anadolu Agency reports.
“France calls for the end of imports of products from illegal settlements into the European Union,” Barrot said during a joint press conference with Icelandic Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir in Reykjavik.
“France and Europe cannot accept that Europe, through its trade, supports illegal activities that compromise the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine,” he added.
Barrot made the remarks while outlining France’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his visit to Iceland.
He also reiterated France’s support for a two-state solution, noting that Iceland had recognized the State of Palestine 15 years ago and that France had joined that path last year.
Barrot said parliamentary elections scheduled for Nov. 28 in Palestine were “an absolute necessity” for the legitimacy of the Palestinian parliament and to pave the way for presidential elections.
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Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Several different factors likely explain this trend, including reductions in planet-cooling aerosols as nations have cleaned up their air pollution, as well as changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, which models struggle to represent.
In June 2026, daily high temperatures averaged across France reached 36.9C, shattering the previous June record set in 2022 by 2.4C.
[For more on the impacts and coverage of Europe’s June heatwave, see Carbon Brief’s explainer.]
The rise in observed temperatures in France has outpaced projections made by climate models, with June maximum temperatures more in line with what was expected for the 2070s.
This is illustrated in the figure below, which shows how France’s average maximum daily high temperature for June recorded in 2026 (black line) compares to climate model projections (blue and orange lines).
Comparison of observed (ERA5, black) and modelled (blue and orange) temperatures across France from 2000 to 2080. Plot shows the maximum daily high temperature recorded in June for each year, after averaging temperatures across France. The model ensembles are bias-corrected CMIP6 model ensembles from the NEX-GDDP (blue) and CIL-GDPCIR (orange) projects. The dashed blue and orange lines are the ensemble averages. Credit: Prof Andrew Dessler.
Counting the death toll of climate change
The downstream impacts of these extreme temperatures are lethal.
Scientists are able to estimate the death toll of high temperatures in many locations, depending on the availability of mortality and climate data.
One option is to examine death certificates to see which deaths have been directly recorded by physicians as related to heat. However, there is strong evidence that this method significantly undercounts heat-related deaths, as most death certificates do not consider environmental factors such as heat when diagnosing the cause of death.
Alternatively, it is possible to calculate the rate of total (“all-cause”) mortality in a given time period relative to previous time periods – for example, by comparing the total number of deaths in June 2026 compared to the average of previous Junes. This “excess deaths” figure can be used as an estimate of the deaths from a heat wave.
Using this approach, Public Health France attributed around 2,000 deaths in France to the extreme heat in the week of 22-28 June.
Finally, scientists can use long-term data on overall mortality and correlate changes in mortality with changes in temperature to understand the statistical relationship between the two.
Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025 that used this third approach found that mortality rates in France increase rapidly in cold or hot conditions as daily maximum temperatures depart further from approximately 20C.
This pattern of a U-shaped response of mortality to temperature – shown in the figure below – is veryconsistent across time periods and regions around the world.
Relationship between daily high temperature and all-cause mortality rates in France, estimated using data over 2004-19. Credit: Dr Christopher Callahan, based on data and methods in Callahan et al. (2025)
To calculate the death toll of the June 2026 heatwave in France, we compared observed temperatures over 12-29 June to their baseline average over 1980-2025.
The difference between these two temperatures helps us understand how many more people died than they would have in the absence of such extreme conditions.
Over 12-29 June, we found that France has experienced around 2,700 heat-related deaths above the average baseline. Day-to-day heat-related mortality rates rose from less than 100 to almost 300 on the hottest days of 24 and 25 June.
This is shown in the graph below, which illustrates the cumulative total heat-related deaths seen in France over the two-and-a-half week period. The inset shows how heat-related deaths fluctuated on a day-to-day basis during this time.
Estimated heat-related mortality over 12-29 June, based on a U-shaped response of mortality to temperature. The main plot shows cumulative total deaths and the inset shows daily deaths. Credit: Dr Christopher Callahan, based on data and methods in Callahan et al. (2025)
Recent analysis by World Weather Attribution has already shown that human-caused climate change increased the frequency and intensity of the June heat wave across Europe.
Meanwhile, previousresearch has shown there is substantial evidence that heat-related mortality in Europe has already been elevated by greenhouse gas emissions.
As a result, we can be confident that at least some of the more than 2,700 deaths already seen in France are directly due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Calculating climate risk
In April, the UN-led body responsible for coordinating the work of climate modelling centres – the Coupled Modelling Intercomparison Project (CMIP) – unveiled a set of seven new emissions scenarios.
These are designed to replace the previous scenarios that have been used by scientists to understand how the climate might change in the future. They will feed into the upcoming seventh assessment report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The range of future emissions in the new CMIP scenarios is smaller, with scenarios of very high or very low emissions no longer on the table.
The retirement of the very-high emissions scenario – known as “RCP8.5” – led to certain commentators in the media and in politics, including US president Donald Trump, arguing that the risks of climate change had been “overstated”.
[For more on false and misleading claims around the new emissions scenarios, see Carbon Brief’s factcheck.]
Our analysis of June’s heat-related deaths in France suggests that, even if the most severe emissions pathways are no longer needed, climate impacts are taking a heavy toll on society.
Moreover, the temperatures seen in France show that climate models continue to underpredict the magnitude of heatwaves for a particular level of global warming.
This is because greenhouse gas emissions are only a first step in estimating the impacts of climate change.
The second step is converting emissions to changes in the climate at both the global and local levels – or hazards. This includes heatwaves, flash floods and droughts.
The third step is to determine how changes in the hazards will affect local populations. This can be determined by calculating people’s exposure and vulnerability to hazards.
Substantial uncertainty persists at every stage of this sequence.
For example, scientists do not know exactly how the global climate will react to ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions – nor the extent to which global temperature increases will drive local climate hazards. We also do not know how climate change at a local level impacts human health outcomes.
Adaptation options, such as air conditioning, heat action plans and social support for isolated people, will be crucial as the climate moves away from the typical conditions that people are used to.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
