Europe burns through its worst fire season in living memory

Southern Europe spent the week fighting fires of a scale its own records struggle to place. In France, the season's burn has reached some 115,000 hectares, with the Gironde fire alone consuming around 42,000 — one of the country's largest since the Second World War. West of Madrid, fires across Ávila and Toledo merged into a single front of roughly 80,000 hectares, the worst in the region's history; the Ávila fire by itself, at about 50,000 hectares, is the largest in Spain's recorded history.

More than a quarter of a million people have been evacuated across France and Spain, with some 220,000 displaced in the Gironde and 30,000 in the Landes at the peak, in heat reaching 42°C. Thirteen people died in a southern Spanish blaze earlier in the month; three firefighters were killed in Greece on Tuesday; in England, a large fire burned in Suffolk within a few miles of a nuclear power station.

The science arrived in the same news cycle as the smoke: research published in Scientific Reports this week found climate change has driven a major intensification of fire activity across the continent.

For a nation that negotiates its survival at climate summits, the European summer reads as evidence submitted early — the warming that bleaches coral at this latitude burns forest at that one.