The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Here is a new feature for this blog, which I will add daily. This is the latest inciteful Green News Report from my friends Desi Doyen and Brad Friedman at Progressive Voices. Hit ‘continue reading,’ listen, then hit return to see my daily topics:
Dear Diary. No doubt about it. Europe has had it much worse this summer than North America with extreme heat and associated wildfires, at least so far. The two heatwaves that affected the U.S. earlier this month that I dubbed Bluestone and ConocoPhillips were hot enough to set all-time records, and ConocoPhillips, which set up across southern Canada and the northern U.S. set off widespread wildfires, which produced choking smoke from the Midwest to the Northeast. Yet these heatwaves did not produce over 10,000 deaths and extensive wildfires like European Heatwave Ember.
As discussed yesterday, Heatwave Ember killed over 10,000 people mainly due to lack of air conditioning. Also, the climate is changing so rapidly in southern Europe that its flora is going up in flames. Western U.S. fires have been awful but nowhere nearly as bad as European blazes. As of this day Europe is in between strong heat domes, yet it remains hot and dry across most of western Europe:
And oh dear, yet another large heat dome will build across the region by next week.
In the meantime, tender vegetation from Spain into France is going up in flames. For more on that here is a new Guardian article:
Thousands flee wildfires in France as temperatures reach extreme levels in southern Europe
Some parts of Mediterranean Sea 5C hotter than normal, with air temperatures above 44C expected in Spain
Firefighters battle the blaze using a water truck near the village of Le Porge in south-western France. Photograph: Romain Perrocheau/AFP/Getty
Thu 23 Jul 2026
Brutal heat torching southern Europe has forced more than 20,000 people to flee wildfires in France as a marine heatwave scalds the Mediterranean and researchers warn that “Dantesque” scenarios cannot be ruled out as infernos worsen.
A “particularly intense” wildfire on France’s Atlantic coast prompted a series of evacuations, including thousands of tourists from campsites and other holiday accommodation, as firefighters struggled to control the blaze.
Extreme highs above 44C were expected in Spain on Thursday, and above 38C on the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily. The previous day, the Spanish cities of Albacete, Ávila and Teruel broke their July temperatures records with heat as high as 42C, according to the Spanish meteorological agency, Aemet.
A marine heatwave is affecting 80% of the Mediterranean Sea’s surface area, according to the Mediterranean Monitoring System. Daily temperatures on Tuesday had reached “extreme” levels in several parts, with some anomalies 5C hotter than the average from 1991-2020.
The severity of fires in the EU has broken records for this time of year, data from the European Forest Fire Information System showed on Wednesday, and about twice as much land had burned by 22 July than the average for that date over the last two decades. France has broken records for the area burned, and both it and Spain have broken records for the number of fires.
The blaze in France, which began in a dense pine forest near the village of Saumos about 40km (25 miles) west of Bordeaux and just north of the bay of Arcachon, a popular tourist destination, had burned more than 3,400 hectares (8,401 acres) in less than 24 hours, firefighters said on Thursday.
No casualties had been reported and only one home destroyed so far, they said, but the Gironde prefecture said that while 700 firefighters and four water-bombing planes were battling to bring the fire under control, the situation remained “unfavourable” and the blaze was not yet stabilised.
France has endured three almost back-to-back heatwaves since May as climate breakdown leads to more frequent and intense extreme weather events causing thousands of excess deaths, evaporating soils and waterways and fuelling wildfires.
Patrick Martineau, 69, who was evacuated from the village of Le Porge, told Agence France-Presse that police had “come banging on the doors … It’s scary – hard to take in. When we bought a home here, we never thought there’d be a fire risk.”
Sylvie, a holidaymaker from Paris staying in the relatively more built-up area of Lège-Cap-Ferret, said a neighbour had told her: “‘Get your bags ready, we’re going to be evacuated during the night.’ We put the bulk of our stuff in the car boot and left.”
Elke Urbain, from Antwerp in Belgium, who holidays in the area every year, said she was advised while she was on the beach on Wednesday afternoon to “go back immediately to the campsite and gather your things. It’s just terribly sad.”
In 2022, a wildfire burned more than 30,000 hectares in the same area, forcing about 50,000 people to be evacuated. In tinder-dry conditions and fanned by a strong wind, the latest blaze has torn through the forest, with flames reaching 10 metres high.
Jean-Luc Helias, 54, from Le Porge, said he and his family had lived through that fire four years ago and “the firefighters do an amazing job to protect people’s homes. All that matters to me is that my family is safe; the rest is just material possessions.”
Nine local municipalities have opened reception centres for evacuees and were sheltering more than 2,500 people, the prefecture said. About 8,800 people were evacuated at midday on Thursday, after 2,000 in the morning and 10,000 overnight.
Numerous roads in the area – including those leading to the Cap Ferret peninsula a few kilometres to the south, home to the villas of celebrities and millionaires and one of France’s most exclusive holiday spots – were closed to all but essential traffic.
Police have opened an investigation into the causes of the wildfire, which the mayor of Le Porge, Martial Zaninetti, said on Wednesday appeared to have been started by a machine that was clearing undergrowth.
A fortnight ago, flames devastated a 10th of the Unesco-listed Fontainebleau forest outside Paris in a rare wildfire so far north. France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has said more than 12,500 wildfires had broken out since the beginning of the year.
In Spain, most of the people evacuated on Wednesday evening owing to a fire 70km south-west of Madrid were also allowed to return home. A fire that has burned 32,000 hectares in the province of Guadalajara, north of the capital, was also described as stable.
Spanish wildfire scientists said they were not surprised by the extreme figures as the abandonment of rural land had left more overgrown vegetation and the rise in temperatures from climate breakdown made it easier for such plant matter to dry out and burn.
Víctor Resco de Dios, a professor of forestry engineering and global change at the University of Lleida, said: “Although it’s difficult to predict how far things might go, we will soon be unable to rule out Dantesque scenarios like those seen in California or Australia, with fires or fire complexes reaching hundreds of thousands of hectares or even a million hectares.”
The marine heatwave in the Mediterranean is projected to shrink but stay strong from Sardinia to Greece, according to a forecast for Saturday from Mercator Ocean. From Gibraltar to the Balearic Islands, strong heat is expected to drop to moderate levels, despite intensifying locally in the Alboran Sea.
Western Europe has been rocked by repeated heatwaves this summer, with extreme highs in June that scientists expect will have killed tens of thousands of people as hot days push bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevent them from resting.
On Wednesday, an analysis estimated the cost of the June heatwave to the continent’s grain farmers at €2bn (£1.7bn) in lost revenue from 9m tonnes of destroyed crops. On Thursday, scientists found climate breakdown had contributed to drought conditions, making levels of soil dryness five times more likely in western Europe and 11 times more likely in eastern Europe.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the U.S. the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Thursday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)