This is Europe’s summer from hell, and it’s not over yet. In Spain and France, wildfires of unprecedented intensity have forced mass evacuations. Farmers in the UK are warning of food shortages from severe drought and record heat waves. Italian officials are raising alarms over drinking water supplies as rivers dwindle. Nuclear power units in Hungary and Romania have been shut down for lack of available cooling water from the Danube River—the Romanian navy even blew up a huge rock blocking river flow to its last functioning reactor.
Such problems are exacerbated by the rate of warming in Europe, which, as Vox notes, is twice the world’s average. The continent has faced multiple extreme heat waves already this year. And even as first responders began to contain the existing fires, new ones were breaking out elsewhere—Bulgaria most recently.
The climate travails extend well beyond Europe. The UN’s World Food Programme predicts that about 50 million people from 45 countries will likely be forced into acute food insecurity over the next year and a half thanks to El Niño conditions, with Central and South America, the Caribbean, and southern Africa most affected. It will be “very important to avoid a situation where large countries stop food exports,” a WFP official told the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey.
The unusually strong El Niño is also expected to bring about the hottest year on record. And those rising temperatures will have effects for years to come. All told, there couldn’t be a worse time for an American president to spend public money promoting fossil fuels and thwarting the production of clean energy.
—Alex Nguyen
