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A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system.
“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.
It has forced the cancellation of concerts and festivals, curtailed the final stage of the Tour de France cycling race and closed the Louvre Museum and Eiffel Tower early. It brought wildfires to the Scottish Highlands. It led organizers in London to call off a conference on how to cope with extreme heat. And it caused at least 10,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in June alone — a number that may turn out to be an undercount.
“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.
