Record high temperatures have wreaked havoc around the world this week. In Southern England, railway tracks bent from the heat. In China, the roof tiles on a museum melted. In Texas, heat and a dry spell have caused nearly 200 water main breaks over the past month. And extreme heat puts lives at risk, too. It’s more deadly than tornadoes, hurricanes, and all other weather events combined. Extreme temperatures, and the attendant misery, are connected to global warming, which is driven by human activity and accelerating. Reporters from around the globe talk about what they’re seeing and how governments are responding. NPR’s Rebecca Hersher, who reports on climate science and policy from the US, NPR’s John Ruwitch in Shanghai and Willem Marx in London. 

A European Parliament effort to roll back policies and subsidies that encourage burning wood pellets for energy has suffered a potential setback. The parliament’s business committee, known as ITRE, voted last week to uphold the current policies that treat wood pellets as a carbon-neutral alternative to coal. That countered a vote in May by the parliament’s environment committee (ENVI) that called for stricter limits on using “primary biomass” — or trees — for energy. ITRE adopted its own revisions to the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive that could actually expand subsidies to wood pellet users — not limit them. In a press conference after the vote, ITRE spokesman Markus Pieper said: “We still have problems with regard to the definition of secondary and primary biomass. The criteria from the ENVI committee, we feel, would limit the availability of biomass.”

So far this year, the amount of land burnt by fires across the European Union is more than three times greater than what you would expect by the middle of July. Almost 346,000 hectares of land have been recorded as burnt, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). Much of Western Europe has been hit by a record-breaking heatwave, which substantially increases the risk of fires. …This fire season is something of an outlier, according to experts. …”Heatwaves and droughts are exacerbated by climate change and are absolutely the defining factor in years with massive wildfire outbreaks, like the present one,” Dr Jones says. But he says other factors such as forest management can affect the likelihood of fires in years with more typical weather. Authorities are increasingly burning down some vegetation, under carefully managed conditions, to make it harder for wildfires to spread.

Also the Associated Press: What’s behind Europe’s spate of deadly wildfires?

PARIS – The fires that have torched through Europe are on course to make 2022 a record year for forest loss on the continent, as scientists warn climate change is already contributing to ever fiercer blazes. Fires in parts of France, Spain and Portugal have already burned more land so far this year than in all of 2021 — some 517,881 hectares, or the equivalent area of Trinidad and Tobago. “The situation is much worse than expected, even if we were expecting temperature anomalies with our long-term forecasts,” Jesus San Miguel, coordinator of the European Union’s EFFIS satellite monitoring service, told AFP. San Miguel said there could be worse to come, adding that the hallmarks of global heating were all over this year’s fire season. “Ignition is caused by people (but) the heatwave is critical, and clearly linked to climate change,” he said.