IT FELT LIKE the house was on fire. One night recently, the stench of smoke sent us scurrying around our home in Shankill, Dublin, checking to see if anything was burning or smouldering.

The source of the smoke, as we quickly figured out, was external, blowing in from the nearby Wicklow mountains. This smell – and taste – is something countless millions of people around the world are having to contend with regularly. If you could smell the future, it would be the acrid scent of burning landscapes.

While it’s still July, wildfires across Europe have already burned more land than the entire annual average of the last two decades.

On Thursday, Spain declared a national emergency as wildfires rage in the region of its capital, Madrid, forcing 70,000 people to evacuate. Across France, nearly 200,000 people have had to flee, including many from the area around Bordeaux.

Fire engines stop on a road as smoke rises from a wildfire in San Martin de Valdeiglesias, west of Madrid, Spain, Sunday, July 26. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez set out the crisis in plain language: “Year after year we clearly see how climate change kills and destroys wealth in our communities. This isn’t politics. It is science, it’s about facts”.

I well remember the 1995 European heatwave and am just about old enough to recall the previous major heatwave, two decades earlier, in 1976. These events were memorable precisely because they were so absolutely abnormal and vanishingly rare.

No longer. As a Met Éireann analysis confirmed, the 1976 heatwave was a strictly regional phenomenon, centred over Ireland and Britain, while mainland Europe was largely unaffected. On the other hand, last year’s multiple European heatwaves were beyond continental scale, as were the three heatwaves so far this summer.

What’s more, even though we experienced no heatwaves in Ireland last year, the average temperature for Ireland in the summer of 2025 was 16.2C, which is significantly warmer than the average 15.8C for what we remember as the scorching summer of 1976. The other marked shift has been towards warmer nights, one of the fingerprints of global warming.

Meanwhile, from the depths of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a powerful El Niño is building, leading scientists to fear that 2026 and into 2027 may see unprecedented temperature rises. While El Niños are part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling related to upwelling of ocean currents, these have become supercharged by the additional energy in the global climate system. 

Next year, global average temperatures may breach 1.7C above pre-industrial, a simply mind-boggling scenario, given that as recently as 2015, the governments of the world signed up to the Paris Agreement on climate change, which stressed the need to keep temperature increases this century below the 1.5C danger line. 

Fires in southwestern........

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