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).😜
Main Topic: Why European Leaders Are Staying Silent After a Summer of Climate Shock
Dear Diary. You would think that across the pond after a summer that was even worse than one endured across the states that European politicians would be clamoring for climate solutions, but no. Has fossil fuel loving Trumpism been adopted there? Hardly. The answer as usual comes from the title of Al Gore’s famous film, An Inconvenient Truth. European as well as American politicians are afraid to tell their constituents that they will have to suffer short term pain to see long term gain on climate.
It will cost money to replace ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles with all electrics paid for either by individuals and/or tax money. It will be inconvenient to take mass transit and fly less. It will also cost money to better insulate homes and replace any fossil fuel using appliances and heaters with all electric devices. And then there is the price for making the total switch to renewables for electric generation and electrical storage via expensive batteries, all of which politicians are afraid of insisting that citizens buckle up and accept in the long term.
So, here is the situation that we have disappointingly across the pond after four very historic heatwaves that have caused thousands of deaths. I would ask that people grow a spine.
Here are more details from the Guardian:
Why are European leaders staying silent after our summer of climate shock?
Lethal temperatures and wildfires have exposed a widening gulf between voters demanding action and politicians unwilling to confront the long-term choices global heating requires
Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez is one of the few European leaders who seems to be taking the climate crisis seriously. Photograph: Chema Moya/EPA
Wed 26 Aug 2026
The climate crisis means “we’re going to have to change everything – the way we live, the way we produce, the way we trade,” France’s veteran radical-left firebrand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, told the summer congress of his France Insoumise party last weekend.
The term “climate change”, said Mélenchon – the most likely rival to Marine Le Pen in next year’s presidential run-off, according to one poll this week – may sound “almost reassuring”, but its actual impact will feel like “landing on another planet whenever we leave home”.
The speech is notable because despite the four heatwaves that have scorched Europe this summer, shattering temperature records, fanning unprecedented fires and causing thousands of excess deaths, few politicians want to talk about climate action.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating up twice as quickly as elsewhere. The consequences, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell puts it, are “reaching national emergency levels”.
And yet major policy speeches by Europe’s political leaders addressing the climate crisis, making plain its causes, and laying out the changes that will be needed to live with it can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
French voters have faced “silence from some politicians and inadequate pronouncements or demagoguery from others”, said Le Monde in a stark editorial, warning that “decision-makers on both the right and the left are losing credibility”.
People want “a political message that translates into action, and sheds light on the future”, it said. The gap between “citizens’ heightened awareness of the crisis and the lack of commitment from their elected officials to address it” will trigger mounting frustration and anger.
A mid-July Ipsos poll found environmental protection had jumped 12 points from June to become French voters’ fourth greatest concern, after what the pollster described as “a first real experience of what the hell of a significantly hotter world might look like”.
In the UK too, Labour party activists worry that despite the ever more visible impacts of the climate crisis, there has been no major political push from the government on the issue, even as voters become increasingly convinced of the need for action.
And while Friedrich Merz said this week action was needed to “curb climate change and adapt to the consequences” (though not at a cost to German industry), he’s been accused all summer of ducking the issue for fear of boosting the climate-sceptic, far-right AfD.
There are, of course, exceptions. Spain’s outspoken prime minister, Pedro Sánchez (pictured top), has long warned that “climate change kills”, and recently stressed: “It’s not enough to address the consequences; what we have to do is reduce its causes.”
A French centre-left presidential contender, Raphäel Glucksmann, spoke this week of the need for an “ecological transformation” ending the use of fossil fuels, and pledged a 100-day “ecological revolution” if elected president (which looks extremely unlikely).
But the silence from most mainstream politicians is deafening, says Jean Jouzel, a veteran French climatologist. The political class in general, he says, “have simply not yet engaged with the reality of global heating. They have to tackle it head-on.”
The root of the problem, Jouzel suggests, is that “politicians live in the short-term. Their horizon is avoiding any damage during their period in office. For me, a real political leader … has the courage to look to the medium and the long-term.”
Short-termism, political polarisation and cost-of-living fears have, in effect, silenced leaders across Europe, as populist and far-right parties successfully frame green laws as an “ideological mantra” and the elite’s punishment for “ordinary working people”.
The reasoning is clear: voters suffering high energy bills, food inflation and stagnating wages are unlikely to hail demands for real financial and lifestyle sacrifices in pursuit of an ill-defined climate gain. Carbon taxes and boiler restrictions carry electoral risk.
Local over global
But that reluctance to address the real issue has shifted Europe’s climate debate away from long-term carbon reduction towards more localised adaptation – which, perhaps inevitably, has itself now become a battleground in the continent’s culture wars.
Air conditioning is a prime example, now loudly touted on Europe’s right as a vital symbol of personal freedom and technological comfort, but widely decried by the left as environmentally irresponsible and symptomatic of long-term planning failures.
“If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan,” Le Pen trumpeted this summer, arguing the technology had little or no impact on global heating: “When environmentalists don’t want something, they twist the studies.”
The risk in all this is that by focusing on necessary but essentially reactive coping measures, leaders wind up reducing the existential challenges of global heating to debates over consumer choice and comfort that can fit into an electoral cycle.
Meanwhile, vital long-term carbon reduction gets pushed further and further into the background. As Dutch MEP, Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, argues: “Nobody should feel guilty for wanting relief from extreme heat. Air conditioning saves lives.” However, he continues, neither should we “accept the cynical argument that the answer to rising temperatures is simply to install more air conditioning – while abandoning the very policies designed to tackle the causes of those rising temperatures”.
Be that as it may, in the multiple European countries with national elections coming up over the next 18 months – including France, Italy and Spain – the climate emergency remains, for the time being at least, largely absent from the debate.
And that’s regrettable, because as Jouzel says: “Global heating is no longer a scientific debate. It’s a very real political problem.” Grégoire Leménager, writing in the French weekly Le Nouvel Obs, agreed. “Looking the other way is no longer an option,” he said. Nothing is simple, but after the summer Europe has just endured, politicians who “refuse to make climate action a cornerstone of their manifestos” will, he continued, “be exposed for what they are: criminal accomplices to an inevitable defeat”.
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Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet 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 Saturday:
(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.)