Are we understanding it yet? As Europe burns in the west, the south and the north, are we grasping the fact that our economies, food systems, political stability and even our ability to plan for the future, will all be charred in a world on fire?

Paris got a taste of what is in store for us Europeans when, weeks ago, fire ripped through Fontainebleau forest, a bouldering paradise and one of the world’s first natural reserves. But the wildfires currently threatening Bordeaux and Madrid, which experts are calling the most extreme seen in Europe, are apocalyptic in comparison. In the Gironde region around Bordeaux, tens of thousands of hectares have burned, creating an unpredictable “thunderstorm of fire” as the region’s chief administrator called it. More than 200,000 people have been displaced in the largest peacetime evacuations in France’s history. Only the bravery of firefighters, dozens of whom have been injured, is keeping the fires within mere kilometres of Bordeaux and its more than a million inhabitants.

In Spain, multiple fires have merged on the outskirts of Madrid, creating “the largest fire in Spain’s history”, burning more than triple the hectares of an average July as yet another heatwave menaces the country. Scientists blame “weather whiplash” due to the accelerating climate crisis for bringing the fires this close to the ancient streets and squares of Madrid and Bordeaux. As far south as Sicily, as far north as Norway, the story is much the same: a summer of almost unendurable heat has erupted into tempests of flame.

Across the Atlantic, thick smoke drifting southwards from fires across Canada’s 270m hectares of boreal forest obscured, once again, the skies in........

© The Guardian