Not a Normal Summer: Science Refutes Climate Change Deniers
As a summer marked by extreme heatwaves in Europe draws to a close, politicians are beginning to reckon with the consequences. Germany recorded around 14,000 heat-related deaths, nearly two-thirds of them occurring in a single scorching week in June. A Dutch bank estimated that the summer heat will cost the European Union €180 billion in gross domestic product. Meanwhile, in June, European farmers lost around 9 million tonnes of cereal harvests.
Climate change, long a politically charged issue, has now become a daily reality for people around the world. These impacts and other consequences are making it increasingly difficult to deny what people can see with their own eyes. Yet that has not stopped populist right-wing groups in various parts of the world from continuing to try. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Britain’s far-right Reform Party, said, “Climate change has always happened and will always happen,” adding that it would be arrogant for humans to try to stop it. He even encouraged the British public to enjoy the hot weather.
In the United States, Harriet Hageman, a Republican politician who could become Wyoming’s next senator, told the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice that the heatwave in Europe was nothing unusual. “It’s called summer. There are years that are hotter than others, and there are years that are colder than others,” she said. “That’s the nature of weather cycles.”
Meanwhile, Tino Chrupalla, one of the co-leaders of Germany’s far-right AfD party, told a journalist in recent days that this was a “completely normal summer.” He described climate change as “hype.” But such claims do not hold up under scientific scrutiny. As NASA has stated unequivocally: “Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities (primarily the human burning of fossil fuels) have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn continue to impact Earth’s climate.”
This was not a “completely normal summer.” This summer was one of the hottest in recorded history. Independent climate monitoring agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US, the Copernicus Climate Change Service in the European Union, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, all identified last month as the joint hottest or second-hottest month ever recorded.
The conditions caused power plants to halt production, ageing concrete motorways to buckle, and old buildings to overheat during the day and barely cool at night, leaving their occupants at risk of heat stress. Extreme heat was felt across almost the entire globe. According to NOAA data, July was the hottest July ever recorded in North America, Africa and Asia.
The contiguous United States has just surpassed its record high temperature for July. The previous record was set in 1936, when the famous Dust Bowl phenomenon scorched the US Great Plains with extreme temperatures, and in 2012, when North America was hit by an extreme heatwave. Meanwhile, the daily average sea surface temperature reached its highest level since records began in 1979, at 21.1 degrees Celsius this month. That is the result of a combination of human-caused warming and El Niño, a climate cycle that weakens trade winds and warms the surface waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean.
In Spain, the far-right Vox party said that the fires—which this season have burned more than 254,000 hectares across the country—were unrelated to climate change. But experts agree that rising global temperatures play a major role in the highly intense wildfire season, which has also scorched vast areas of France and Canada. Extreme heat creates ideal conditions for wildfires and their spread.
One field of climate research known as attribution science examines the extent to which climate change worsens extreme weather events such as this summer’s wildfires. Using various models, researchers compare the likelihood and severity of an event under current climate conditions with a simulated world that has not experienced human-caused warming. Analyses conducted this summer show that higher global temperatures created conditions that made wildfires in Spain 20 times more likely, and twice as likely in France.
This is linked to a phenomenon known as weather whiplash, in which ecosystems undergo drastic and repeated shifts between wet and dry conditions. As the planet warms, the atmosphere can hold more water vapour, rainfall becomes more intense, and plants grow more vigorously. Then, in summer, the same warm atmosphere draws water from the soil and plants, worsening drought and drying out vegetation, turning it into perfect fuel for fires.
“We know—and this has been proven mathematically—that the likelihood of fire-supporting weather conditions that can sustain and trigger such events has changed due to climate change,” Francesca Di Giuseppe, fire forecast project coordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, told DW about this summer’s fires in Spain and France.