I’ve been talking to some Senior Scientists in recent months, working on a new series of videos that will be aimed at this current wave of “New” Climate Denial, which is the same as the old climate denial, but aimed, perhaps at a generation that hasn’t been well informed, or perhaps that can not remember a world that was not burning.
Yesterday, I spoke to Daniel Swain, one of our most valuable players on the science comms team. As always, lucid, eloquent, informative, and had a lot to say.
Above, we discussed some issues related to the recent shocking heat events in the US and Europe.
A troubling pattern has emerged in this summer’s heat: Not only has it broken records, it’s done so often by margins far above the previous all-time highs.
These heat jumps are part of a larger shift of climate change seeming to accelerate. Ocean temperatures just reached a new high for the early summer. Sea levels are rising faster than before, while new records for daily rainfall are being set at a rapid clip. The pace of global warming itself has quickened in recent years.
While scientists have long braced for climate change, the growing severity of its impacts is shocking them.
Today’s climate can “seem like an unexpected step change” from that of a few years ago, said atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University.
Climate models from decades ago have proved prescient, closely aligning with what the mercury later showed: heat increasing around the planet, caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels.
As the global average temperature rises gradually, changes on the ground can be abrupt and dramatic, hurting people and damaging property. Especially during El Niño weather phases, one of which began in June and is set to bring months of misbehaving weather.
El Niños exacerbate the heating brought about by greenhouse gas pollution and can cause billions of dollars in direct economic damage, from flooding, crop losses, wildfires and civil unrest. The indirect costs reach trillions in lost gross domestic product.
Some models suggest this El Niño could push warming briefly as high as 2C. And “it is possible for a single month to surpass this threshold,” said Sarah Kapnick, global head of climate advisory at JPMorgan Chase & Co. The world is currently at 1.4C above pre-industrial levels.
Scientists have long warned that change will not be smooth.
“Far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges,” wrote the late Wallace Broecker in 1995, two decades after he coined the term “global warming.”
Europe’s most extreme heatwave so far may have killed between 17,000 and 25,000 people, according to an early estimate based on past deaths from heat in the region.
“These numbers are preliminary,” says Christopher Callahan at Indiana University. “But they highlight the need for rapid adaptation investments to avoid these impacts in the future.”
Callahan’s estimate is based on a study his team published last year. “We’re taking data on temperature and mortality across Europe, and we are correlating how high temperatures relate to excess mortality rates,” says Callahan. “We then use that relationship to infer how a given heatwave affects mortality over a region like Europe.”
Callahan’s conclusion is that the heatwave in Europe from 22 to 28 June 2026 killed approximately 20,390 people, including 5210 in France, 4543 in Germany, 3163 in Spain, 2709 in Italy and 862 in the UK. These numbers are much higher than the direct counts announced so far, but this isn’t surprising because it takes time for data on deaths to be collected and analysed.
“This figure is a modelled estimate rather than a final count, and it will be some months before the true toll is confirmed, in part because heat rarely appears on a death certificate,” says Raquel Nunes at the University of Warwick in the UK.
“While scientists have long braced for climate change, the growing severity of its impacts is shocking them.”
Jeez! If even scientists are shocked by the power of an exponential curve, what hope is there that the politicians might actually, just maybe, consider doing something abut it?