Australia Weather News
"What climate will this boy grow up in?"
It's the question on climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf's mind as he takes this photo during his July holiday in southern France.
Flames have engulfed the region in what's described as the worst wildfires Europe has seen in modern history. But, as Mr Rahmstorf knows, this catastrophe did not come as a surprise.
As a wind change sent smoke over this beach at Lacanau, north-west of Bordeaux in France, Mr Rahmstorf decided it was time to leave.
The impact of climate change had been part of his research work for decades. Now it had followed him into his summer holiday.
"There was a deep-red Sun even at midday in the sky, and it turned the whole landscape into an eerie orange glow and looked like some kind of a dystopian movie," Mr Rahmstorf said.
"The beach life basically went on, the surf lessons went on … as holiday-makers we couldn't really do anything to help.
"That little boy moved me because I was thinking about his future … would he grow up in an escalating climate disaster? Or will we actually manage to get out of fossil fuels fast enough?"
Europe's cards were stacked against it
Western Europe is on fire. From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea, blazes are burning in France, Spain, Greece and Türkiye. Authorities are already calling it the worst fire season in modern history.
The fires, which have burnt thousands of hectares on the outskirts of Spain's capital, Madrid, and Bordeaux, did not fall into a vacuum. Back-to-back heatwaves preceded them.
The heatwaves were not only startling due to their scale, but also their timing.
Before summer had officially started, at the end of May, Western Europe experienced daily average temperatures of more than 10 degrees Celsius above average across western France, England and Wales.
About a month later, large swathes of Europe sweltered through another heatwave, described by many scientists as the worst the continent had ever seen. It marked June 2026 as the hottest ever recorded for Western Europe and the second-warmest globally.
Some reports suggest there were more than 10,000 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave. The economic toll was estimated to be close to $2 billion.UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the June heatwave had "the fingerprints of the climate crisis all over it".
Heatwaves have gripped Europe for much of the summer.
Reuters
Australian National University climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick said the European summer brought back "bad memories" of what Australia experienced in 2019-20.
"It's eerily similar to what we experienced during Black Summer just six years ago," she said.
"To see the devastation of extreme temperatures, prolonged drying, and then the raging wildfires occurring directly after that … it's just so tragic."
Ms Perkins-Kirkpatrick said she felt "despair" for Europe, primarily because the conditions had not come as a surprise.
"We knew this was going to happen in parts of the world which aren't necessarily in tune to these sorts of events," she said.
"Why couldn't we have adapted quicker and more effectively?"
During the June heatwave, all-time temperature records tumbled at more than 250 weather stations in Europe.
[List of records]It was the first time in the history of the UK's current weather warnings system that red alerts were issued for three straight days. France recorded its hottest day on record on June 24, with an average national temperature of 30C, while overnight temperatures set a new national record of 22C.
A separate heatwave gripped Spain in early June, with 40.5C recorded in Barcelona, the highest temperature in more than a century of data.
Why Europe is the globe's furnace
Europe is heating at more than twice the global average, and while ongoing research tries to determine why, some factors are already known.
The continent is influenced by its proximity to the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on the planet.
Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing by about 0.75C a decade, partly due to a feedback loop known as the albedo effect. Melting ice is exposing darker ocean water, which is able to absorb more sunlight. That water, in turn, releases more heat back into the atmosphere, leading to further ice melting.
The European temperatures recorded in June were driven by the highest sea surface temperatures on record for the month, including marine heatwaves across the western Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.
Mr Rahmstorf, who is also an oceanographer at Germany's University of Potsdam, said the marine heatwaves provided an additional heating factor.
"The air masses that stream into Europe, often from the sea, don't get cooled as much by the water underneath," he said.
There are also studies suggesting climate change could be contributing to the increasing persistence of double jet streams, which are fast-flowing higher-altitude air currents that can trap heat over the continent.
Europe's summer temperatures have reached a "new normal". Looking at where the majority of today's temperatures fall compared to the past shows what is behind that shift.
[Graph 2]The red bell curve shows that the majority of temperatures between May and July this year are about 4C hotter than they used to be. Heat extremes that have never been recorded before are now happening.
Even a slight shift in average temperatures sees a large increase in the frequency and intensity of heat extremes.
"I still hear it, people saying, 'I don't mind if tomorrow is a couple of degrees warmer'; we all hear about climate change and limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius," Ms Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.
"That small change in global average temperature means a much, much, much larger change in the frequency and severity of the actual temperature extremes that we'll experience, which is where all the impacts happen."
'Thirsty' air creates tinderbox
The extra heat in the system this summer dried out the land surface more rapidly than usual, contributing to an extreme drought across parts of Europe.
Ailie Gallant is a climate scientist with the Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather at Monash University.
She said blocking high-pressure systems had trapped warm, dry and "thirsty" air over Europe, which had effectively sucked the land dry.
"It sits over for a week or two, and so you get this kind of amplification of this drying signal and of course, that means particularly when it's coupled with extreme heat, plants just shut down," Dr Gallant said.
"They can hit their wilting point very quickly, they dry out very quickly, they lose that moisture, and that makes those conditions in the vegetation and forests just ripe for fire."
Dr Gallant said Australian vegetation had adapted to hotter conditions.
"Big eucalypts have these very, very deep roots that tap right into the ground to access the moisture that's really deep because they know they're going to go through dry periods," she said.
"Whereas, the oak forests of north-western Europe aren't really used to that, so that's also a way that they can become stressed more quickly and really dry out."
Drier soil can also exacerbate heatwaves because a lack of moisture means there is no evaporative cooling from the surface, which reinforces warmer temperatures.
[CHART: Soil Moisture]When the land surface and vegetation dry out, it does not take much to ignite.
"As a climate scientist, as an Australian, we can kind of understand these types of mechanisms coming together because we've lived and breathed them here in Australia," Ms Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.
"But for some regions over there, it's not something that happens particularly often, at least to this ferocity."
While fires are part of life in Australia, Western Europe is now grappling with the reality of blazes hurtling towards major population centres and seeing more than 300,000 people flee.
Earlier this week, French President Emmanuel Macron described the wildfires as "completely unprecedented".
"The situation we are dealing with today is the most severe we have ever recorded, the toughest since the Second World War."
But he also warned the threat was not over, with Europe's fourth heatwave of the season hindering firefighting efforts this week, while intense fires are also impacting Greece.
What's in store for Australia's summer?
An extreme summer in the northern hemisphere doesn't mean Australia will have an equally bad season, and there are several factors that will determine what conditions in the southern hemisphere look like over coming months.
El Niño, which has been declared by the Bureau of Meteorology, increases the risk of heatwaves, droughts and bushfires in Australia. While some modelling suggests it could become the strongest on record, that doesn't mean strong impacts on the country's climate.
There are concerns a positive Indian Ocean Dipole could develop, which can reinforce dry conditions when teamed with El Niño.
Ms Perkins-Kirkpatrick added that conditions could also depend on sea surface temperatures surrounding Australia, not just in the equatorial Pacific, but she emphasised that it was too early to tell.
"If they remain really warm, then we could potentially see a little bit more rainfall but at this stage, we just don't know," she said.
"So it's really, let's wait and see, let's hope for the best but I can't stress enough, we also need to prepare for the worst."