Danger Season in the northern hemisphere is reaching a new level of ecological disruption, civic chaos and human suffering. The Washington Post reports that ‟major wildfires and their massive, suffocating plumes of smoke blanketed vast swaths of North America and Europe, in some cases combining with intense heat waves that exacerbated flammable conditions and contributed to human misery.” The smoke lingered for days in densely populated cities, spreading toxins and increasing the risk of asthma attacks, heart disease and strokes. The New York Times notes that, as meteorological records are shattered, Europe feels close to a breaking point. Fires have led to the largest-ever peacetime evacuations in France and Spain, with 300,000 people displaced, villages destroyed and lives disrupted. In France, the Louvre Museum and the Eiffel Tower were closed, the final stage of the Tour de France was curtailed and a conference about coping with extreme heat was canceled. At least 10,000 heat-related deaths have occurred, and in some regions bomb squads were deployed as remnant cold war and WWII munitions were exploding.

As wildfires burned even in the Scottish Highlands, scientists were grimly noting that these conditions will be routine in Europe’s future summers. ‟Far from moderating, some experts say the pace of warming appears to be accelerating. France’s weather and climate service has painted a dystopian picture, saying that by 2050, heat waves could be five times more frequent, while temperatures could hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit.”

There is no doubt that climate change is driving the record-breaking temperatures and wildfires. The Washington Post quotes climate scientist Daniel Swain: ‟The conspicuous overlap between record-breaking warmth, dryness, and/or low snowpack and these fires is simply not a coincidence. The scientific evidence linking increasingly extreme fire weather, as well as increasingly extreme wildfires themselves, to climate warming is clear.” AP reports on scientific studies concluding that climate change made the hot and dry conditions in Spain 20 times more likely. Politico notes that leading Spanish and UK ministers ‟described this summer’s fires and extreme heat as ‘a consequence of the climate crisis.’ They agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”

The heat brings impacts beyond just fire and threats to health. The BBC reports that record-low water levels in the Danube has caused Hungary’s only nuclear power plant to close for the first time ever. Bloomberg notes that a nuclear power plant in France had to shut down as high water temperatures interfered with proper cooling (ongoing heat resulted in three French reactors going offline, and five had to reduce power output, just as air-conditioning demand was increasing, according to Politico). Reuters describes how low flows in major rivers are also restricting boat and barge traffic that are a vital part of the European economy (great photos in the Atlantic).

The Guardian notes that over 900 wildfires are burning across Canada, prompting evacuation orders and pushing Ontario into its worst wildfire season on record. In British Columbia, more than 100 wildfires were burning in early August, with conditions so extreme that fires were referred to as ‟exploding” instead of just igniting.

The boreal forests of Canada, which stretch across 1 million square miles from the Yukon to Newfoundland, are being primed to burn by climate change. The Atlantic describes the situation: ‟wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees.” The intense forest fires resulting from these conditions have been predicted by scientists for the last 30 years. One scientist stated that, ‟as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”

While Donald Trump pathetically blames the Canadians for mismanaging their forests, it is important to recognize that the boreal forests of northern Canada are not the same as the conifer forests of the U.S. In the latter, over 100 years of fire suppression caused forests to grow denser and allowed a buildup of fuel that raised the odds of major fires. But the boreal forests are not characterized by the regular low-level fires of the conifer forests. Instead, they grow and grow, and then have catastrophic fires that burn them to the ground. In this ecology, ‟prescribed burning” will not achieve anything, as once fires ignite (usually by lightning), the fire spreads through the crowns of trees rather than on the ground.

In The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather observes that ‟only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing. So next time someone tells you Canada’s fires can be solved by raking the forests, you can point out that the thing filling their sky with smoke is a lightning-struck, drought-primed boreal forest doing what a warming climate is making it do more and more often.”

An op-ed in the Guardian notes that, not only is Trump’s anger at Canada for not ‟raking its forests” completely out of touch with the reality of the vast boreal forest of Canada, but ‟the Trump Administration is dismantling the very public agencies Americans need to study and mitigate wildfires.” A report from the USDA’s inspector general notes that the U.S. Forest Service lost nearly 6,000 employees in 2025, about 16% of its workforce. The Trump Administration’s latest budget request would cut the Forest Service’s discretionary funding by roughly 75% and eliminate major firefighting programs.

Powerful wildfires are also burning in the U.S. The Guardian reports that ‟Oregon has already logged more burned acreage this year than any in recorded history. Washington, meanwhile, is in the midst of its most destructive fire season.” And, as there are months left before the fire risk declines, the danger is not over. There were 95 large fires across the U.S. in late July, with more than 600 fires igniting during a 10-day period in July. Some of the fires were burning in areas that, during a normal precipitation year, would still be covered by snow. Salon notes that three major fires have devastated Spokane County, Washington, ‟prompting the evacuation of almost 65,000 people and destroying more than 700 homes.” Spokane now joins Lahaina, Boulder, Los Angeles and Santa Rosa on the growing list of U.S cities that have been devastated by uncontrollable wildfires.

In The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells notes that, while more wildfires were predicted by climate scientists for decades, there had been a lack of appreciation for the impact of smoke from these blazes on highly urbanized areas under certain meteorological conditions. ‟All told, the monetary damages from wildfire smoke deaths are now expected to exceed those from all other climate impacts combined.”

Despite the planet raging in flames as never before (but as predicted by climate scientists), Media Matters reports that you would never know about the wildfire-climate change connection by watching legacy news channels. ‟ABC, CBS, and NBC closely tracked the extreme heat as it moved across the country, repeatedly reporting threatened or broken records and warning viewers about dangerous conditions. What the networks did not explain was why these events kept arriving in rapid succession. Instead, viewers saw extensive reporting on dangerous and record-breaking heat without an explanation of how human-caused warming is making such extreme weather more frequent and severe.”

Summing up the recent developments, Bill McKibben states that ‟we can and must say that global warming is proceeding even faster than feared [and] is causing daily disruption across the planet. This is the most basic news that the world needs to know, the most important thing happening on our Earth. The degree to which we are now dancing along the precipice can’t be overstated.”

He also notes, however, that the transition away from fossil fuels is accelerating. In 2012, only about 1% of California’s electricity was from solar power, but in May 2026 about half of the state’s power came from solar. The expansion of battery storage is key to this, and has led to a 60% decline in electricity generation from natural gas. ‟This is among the most significant statistics the climate fight has yet produced. In the fourth largest economy on earth, an extensive buildout of renewable energy has immediately and radically undercut the use of fossil fuels. No other intervention in the last forty years has come even remotely close to this scale of decarbonization.”

The Trump Administration’s response to climate disruption is to continue its ridiculous program of forcing coal-fired power plants to operate even when utilities and communities want them shut down (maybe we should call this ‟recarbonization”?). Canary Media reports that the cost of this program has reached $430 million as of July, 2026 (the article provides updates on each of the facilities that have been forced to stay open). This conflict will intensify in the coming years as more than 20 coal plants are slated for closure before the end of Trump’s term, include Minnesota’s Sherburne County plant, ‟whose owner is building one of the nation’s largest solar farms nearby to replace the dirty power.” Multiple lawsuits from states, utilities and NGOs are pending to fight Trump’s “stay open” orders.

In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, my colleague Ben Santer speaks truth to power, calling Donald Trump ‟America’s Nero” for attempting to burn down the National Academy of Sciences. ‟We cannot allow our American Nero to fuel the flames while the planet burns with his reckless pro-fossil fuel policies. And we cannot allow him to destroy institutions—like the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine—that provide a candle in the growing darkness of ignorance.”

I’ll give the final word to David Attenborough, who called out the danger climate change now poses to the security of humanity in a video address to the United Nations Security Council.

< back to news+views