My youngest son has moved to Europe, so the news this summer has me in a state of persistent parental panic. He’s fine, for the record, but sweltering through the fourth (fourth!) deadly heat wave to grip the continent since May.

While my own perceptions are definitely skewed, the statistics are not reassuring. Nearly 10,000 people have died from high temperatures in Germany alone, where my son now lives — and those figures only track that one country, and only through the middle of summer. According to another estimate, the heat wave at the end of June caused over 20,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in a single week. Taking a broader sweep, heat has claimed more than 200,000 European lives in the past four years, according to the World Health Organization.

And the fires. Horrendous wildfires near Bordeaux and Madrid have forced evacuations on a scale unseen since the Second World War. France recorded its first-known pyrocumulonimbus fire storm — a terrifying phenomenon that NASA describes as a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds” — generating plumes high into the atmosphere, intense winds and lightning. “We have entered an era of fires that cannot be extinguished,” said Víctor Resco de Dios, a professor of forestry at the University of Lleida in Spain. “These are fires that burn with the intensity of several atomic bombs.”

By mid-week, the Associated Press estimated about 330,000 people had to flee the flames. By week’s end, Europe’s Copernicus climate monitoring service estimated the figure at nearly 400,000 evacuees.

The fire conditions in Spain were 20 times more likely because of fossil-fuelled climate change, according to a rapid analysis conducted by scientists at World Weather Attribution. The same study found that climate change doubled the chances of conflagrations in France. “As long as we keep burning fossil fuels, temperatures will increase globally. And that........

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