“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was driven out of his home by the approaching flames. He could have been speaking for millions of people across Europe.
Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.
It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Europe is ground zero when it comes to impacts” from climate change, said Johan Rockström, a Swedish scientist who is the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“2026 is just the beginning,” Professor Rockström added. “It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation.”
Yet no other continent has warmed as rapidly as Europe, at nearly twice the global average since the mid-1990s. That has forced Europeans to confront, more starkly than others, the harsh realities of a changed climate, particularly in the summer, when their once-mild days have given way to furnacelike heat.
Though still cooler than other parts of the world, like the American Southwest or the Persian Gulf region, Europe is less able to cope because its buildings are often without air-conditioning and were built to retain heat. The homogeneity of the trees on its hillsides and coastal plains, many of which were planted during cooler, wetter periods, make them dangerously flammable during fire season.
“With this heat wave and these fires, you can say it starts to become unbearable,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a Swiss climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
Whether it leads to drastic new measures — either to mitigate the effects of a warmer climate or to adapt to them — is another question.