Heat records were obliterated across Western Europe yesterday, with Paris reaching an unfathomable all-time high of nearly 109 degrees.
It’s the second heat wave in the region in as many months — and this one has been even more brutal than June’s. As I wrote earlier this week, research shows that human-caused climate change has dramatically upped the odds for extreme heat events like this.
More broadly, July is on track to be the warmest month ever directly recorded on Earth, and 2019 is all but certain to be a top five year.
With all of this in mind, it should probably come as no surprise that a staggering number of intense wildfires have been blazing across vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes. Over the last six weeks, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service has tracked more than 100 intense and long-lived wildfires in the Arctic.
As a release from CAMS observes, these blazes are pumping an enormous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — which, of course, only exacerbates global warming further:
