‘Extremely scary findings’ show climate crisis is supercharging Europe’s wildfire weather

Latest study says global heating has made hot, dry and windy conditions in Spain at least 20 times more likely The extreme heat and drought stoking huge wildfires in Spain and France were made far more likely by the climate crisis, a scientific analysis has found. Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France, experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated. The finding is the latest to pin the blame for the continent’s sweltering and deadly summer firmly on the heating caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal. The intense heatwave at the end of June, which is estimated to have killed 20,000 people, could not have happened without the extra heat trapped by carbon pollution, a previous WWA study showed. Another found that the climate crisis-driven heat was “sucking soils dry” as extreme drought spread across Europe. Searing heat and parched land led to very high “daily severity ratings”, the metric that was used in the new analysis and which measures how severe a wildfire will be if ignited. Studies of the 2025 wildfires also found they were supercharged by the climate crisis. Th