From Nethy Bridge in the Cairngorms, to Bordeaux and its coastal peninsula, Cap Ferret, and then on to Madrid, communities across Europe are being forced to run for their lives from the wildfires now raging uncontrollably.
It is as if nature is biting back. Millions of people are affected directly or indirectly. Crops – including prized vineyards – are lost or at risk, property and businesses destroyed, tourism devastated.
The weather maps show such blazes at increasing probability of breaking out in an arc running from Portugal to Romania, also taking in much of the British isles – braced for its fourth heatwave of the summer – and even northern Finland. This is not “just weather”, but a series of no-longer freakish events that are the most tangible proof yet of the science of climate change.
That they are sometimes not unprecedented is hardly a source of comfort, given that the last such outbreaks were only a year or so ago. Thus, while some 1,254 major forest fires have been recorded in Europe this year, slightly down on the equivalent period in 2025, this is much more than double the longer-term average of 579 incidents.
Of course, neither is this a purely European matter, nor just one of heat, though the Old World is sweltering more than most. A similar “heat zone”, the third this year, is also settling over about 70 million people in North America, from the Great Plains to the Gulf of Mexico, while smoke from Canadian wildfires is still billowing south to New York.
Earlier this year, climate change contributed to deadly floods across much of sub-Saharan Africa and tropical storms in southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the full El Niño effect is yet to materialise, and active glacier melt accelerates in Greenland (another excellent reason to keep Donald Trump out of the Danish territory).
As ever, not every extreme event should be lazily attributed to climate change, but recent events do bear out the scientific evidence for this long-term trend, and serve as a timely reminder that there is worse to come. Science can provide explanations and propose solutions – such as limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5C over pre-industrial levels.
But action is a matter for politics, and it is a tragedy that in recent years, the consensus about climate change and value of global net zero targets has slipped so badly. In the UK, the new Burnham administration seems keen to slide back into drilling for more North Sea oil and gas.
Reform UK has made much populist electoral progress by promoting a mix of anti-science conspiracy theories and nihilism – the notion that nothing can be done even if it is man-made, so why bother? Even the Green Party under Zack Polanski has rearranged its agenda to put Gaza at the centre of its offering, at the expense of more traditional, ecological causes.
However, it is within the Conservative Party, still the alternative government, that the regression has been so inexplicable and regrettable. Ever since Margaret Thatcher (a chemist by training) made a landmark speech in 1988 at the UN General Assembly on the subject, the party has been at the forefront of international efforts to protect life on earth. There can be few nobler causes.
When David Cameron became leader two decades ago, he too championed the environment, famously going to the Arctic to “hug a husky”. Theresa May made a binding commitment to make the British economy “net zero”, and Boris Johnson, for all his baleful defects, kept up the momentum at COP summits.
Now, however, Kemi Badenoch, a self-confessed “net zero sceptic”, says she will block prospective Conservative candidates and former MPs from standing for her party if they support the UK 2050 net zero targets. It is a ludicrous volte-face for a democratic organisation with a proud record in this field. The shift is based entirely on a perhaps wilful misapprehension about the nature of green, renewable energy – something Ms Badenoch unfortunately shares with Nigel Farage.
The basic truth about solar and wind power (as well as a nuclear base load) is that although the initial capital investment can be costly, the reward is a plentiful, stable, cheap and abundant supply of energy, liberating the UK from the unstable fossil-fuel economy and its volatile prices. Saving the planet is just a bonus.
Today, Britain is buffeted by the impact of extreme weather and by soaring energy costs because it doesn’t generate enough renewable energy of its own at home. Certainly, the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are minuscule next to India, say, or China; but these nations are, in fact, also committed under international treaties to reduce their emissions, albeit on a longer timetable.
If Britain and other Western powers abandon their targets, then it’s more likely the other newly industrialising superpowers of Asia will do the same. That is why Mr Trump’s petulant withdrawal from the Paris climate change treaty was so deeply damaging to the prospects for planetary survival – a transcendent “civilisational erasure”.
One day, perhaps those on the right across the world will once again accept climate science, the evidence of their own eyes, and put future generations first. “Make Earth Great Again” would be a fitting slogan.
