CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

One Disaster After Another: Global Warming is Global Warning

Photograph Source: Frenchbluesman – CC BY 4.0

Have we become so desensitized to alarm from the many life-jarring troubles around the world that we can’t see the reality of human-induced global warming? The same way violence in film, television, and 24-7 streamed news has desensitized us to war and conflict, compartmentalized as something from afar. Not in my backyard. I can’t hear you. Well, the heat is here, whether we admit it or not, no more evident than this summer in Europe.

Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and the UK have all suffered extreme heat events in 2026, breaking previous temperature records, while much of the northern hemisphere is undergoing increased hot and dry conditions, impacting agriculture and producing more fires. Record surface temperatures above 33 °C (91.4 F) in the Mediterranean Sea (warmer than the Gulf of Mexico) are also intensifying heat waves across Europe. The Romanian navy even blew up a large underwater rock in a controlled explosion to increase flow to the Old Danube river to provide more cooling to the Cernavodă nuclear power plant amid reduced electric grid output. Mitigation and adaptation may be all we have left.

In the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presented a series of climate disasters in seemingly off-the-radar, underdeveloped countries, but those same disasters are now occurring in developed countries as global temperatures rise and extreme events become more frequent, producing stronger storms, worsening drought that is devastating farms, and generating more virulent fires across wide swathes of land. Amid the worst-ever fire season this past July in Spain and France, former Australian fire and rescue commissioner Greg Mullins stated, “Countries that have always burnt are burning more and countries like the UK, Norway, Greenland that have never burnt are now burning.”

Spain was first to dominate the news cycle this summer as temperatures soared past 40 °C (104 °F) throughout much of the country, intensifying wildfires in Almería that killed 13 people unable to evacuate through instant walls of fire ignited in dried-out vegetation. Wildfires west of Madrid and in Ávila destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, while some are still burning. One Zaragoza city temperature sign showed 56 °C in direct sunlight and Sumacàrcer in Valencia registered a sensación térmica (feels like) over 60 °C. Increased “desertification” across the Iberian Peninsula is now a major concern.

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez called a climate emergency “to address the increasingly extreme impacts of climate change,” noting that “climate change denial is the worst fuel” as opposition leaders questioned the reality of human-induced global warming and extreme weather from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The politicization of climate stress is worsening, where ecology is blasted as a new kind of communism.

France especially suffered with 5,700........

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