This week’s heatwave is the hottest ever recorded in Europe, as well as the most humid, and it is likely to cause thousands of deaths.

Although a potential “super El Niño” is forming in the Pacific Ocean, this didn’t play a role in the heatwave, a study by the World Weather Attribution network of scientists has found. Instead, global warming is clearly to blame.

The study analysed how likely the average daily maximum temperature projected for 26 to 28 June in western and central Europe would have been in the cooler climates of 1976 and of 2003.

While the weather pattern – a low-pressure heat dome that is trapping hot air from the south – isn’t unusual, the temperatures are. Fifty years ago, a typical June heatwave would have been about 3.5°C cooler, and the temperatures seen over the next three days would have been a less-than-one-in-10,000-year occurrence.

Daytime temperatures have 44°CÌę (111°čó) in one French town, and nighttime temperatures have remained above 30°C (86°čó) in parts of Spain.

“This event would not have been possible in June without climate change,” at Imperial College London said at a media briefing on 25 June. “The three-day nighttime temperatures would not have been possible at any time of year without climate change.”

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The humidity has also been unprecedented, reaching more than 50 per cent in many British cities. Dew-point temperatures have been in the low 20s, as compared to the single digits during the July 2022 heatwave that set the UK’s temperature record.

The wet-bulb globe temperature, which measures not just air temperature but also humidity, heat radiation and air movement, has broken or is expected to break records in almost half of European cities, the study found.

Humidity amplifies health risks because it slows evaporation, making sweating less effective. While older people or those who have a chronic illness are in particular danger, so are migrants and people experiencing homelessness.

“What we see very clearly
 is how unequal the effects of this heatwave are and how that really demonstrates the inequality that widens due to climate change,” said , also at Imperial College London. “Because it’s of course people who are particularly vulnerable who are most likely to lose their lives.”

While it is too soon to look at excess mortality, a previous study found a smaller heatwave in June and July 2025 killed 2300 people in London and 11 other European cities.

“The health impacts of this heatwave are likely to be extremely high across large parts of northern and central Europe,” said Keeping.

Heatwaves will become even more intense and frequent unless we rapidly cut fossil fuel emissions, the researchers stressed. And Europe, the fastest warming continent, is not ready, as it has an ageing, urban population living in cities built for a cooler era. In the UK, only 5 per cent of homes have air conditioning.

Besides AC, Europe should invest in passive cooling like building insulation, ventilation, green roofs and walls and trees along streets, they said. It should also expand its heat response to include oft-forgotten groups like people with mental health conditions and those who are pregnant, said Carolina Pereira Marghidan at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

“Europe has heat action plans, but research has also shown that sometimes they do not cover all the groups that may be vulnerable,” she said.

Temperatures in the UK have passed 40°C for the first time, with a provisional record of 40.3°C set at Coningsby in Lincolnshire this afternoon.

It comes after a of 25.8°C in Kenley in the London Borough of Croydon, smashing the previous record of 23.9°C in Brighton in 1990.

A heatwave has blanketed large parts of the country, closing schools, heaping pressure on hospitals and disrupting transport. żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”s say that a UK temperature of , and that every heatwave now has been made more likely and more intense by global warming.

“That temperatures are as high as they are is because of human-induced climate change. And we are very certain about this now,” says at Imperial College London.

Europe is sweltering in extreme heat, triggering forest fires across France, Greece, Portugal and Spain. A , with “danger” warnings extending as far north as Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. Thousands of people have been evacuated across Europe, and .

The deadly heat affecting the continent comes as government ministers from more than 40 countries meet in Berlin for annual climate change talks known as the , discussing help for low-income countries and how to cut carbon emissions faster. UN secretary general António Guterres said countries were failing on multilateral climate action. “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide,” he said in a statement today.

In the UK, in the Scottish Borders, which would be a new record for Scotland. On 18 July, .

Public health authorities encouraged people to stay out of the sun during the hottest part of the day and advised against non-essential travel. that their children’s schools were closed or closing early on Monday and Tuesday, despite the UK government saying there is no public health reason for school closures.

“Severe heatwaves are a problem that’s not going away, and they will get worse,” says at the University of Reading, UK. “So we can no longer tolerate poor design of our buildings and our cities. And we urgently need to think about things like reducing overheating, shading trees, building for cooling and providing these public cooling spaces.”

Sleep is interrupted for many people during heatwaves, says at the University of Oxford. He adds there is evidence that shorter and poorer sleep can trigger existing mental health conditions.

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Several European airlines have been engaged in wide-ranging lobbying to challenge European Union climate policies, including imminent plans to force them to use more green biofuels, a UK-based think tank has found.

, a think tank that monitors corporate lobbying around climate change, used freedom of information requests and research to draw up itsÌę. It reveals that while the 10 European airlines looked at for this report have received around €30 billion in government bailouts during the pandemic – – most have simultaneously lobbied to delay new proposals to cut aviation emissions.

Air France-KLM, IAG (the parent company of British Airways), Lufthansa and Ryanair – Europe’s four biggest airlines by carbon dioxide emissions – were found in the report to be the most regressive with their stance towards climate policies. InfluenceMap rated their position roughly on a par with the airline trade bodies IATA and Airlines for Europe (A4E). The airline Easyjet was seen as taking a slightly more progressive stance.

, the report’s author, says the unity of opposition across the sector is “startling” compared to most other sectors, such as energy, where there is usually a more mixed picture.

IATA has labelled the report “a gross distortion of the aviation industry’s genuine and long-standing sustainability efforts”.

According to the report, one of the most significant lobbying targets was repeated attempts by IATA and A4E to persuade the European Commission (EC) to address emissions from international aviation from the mid-2020s through a global carbon offsetting scheme, CORSIA, rather than the EU’s own carbon market, the ETS.

The EC has that in several respects CORSIA was “less ambitious than the regulation of aviation within the EU ETS”.

Lufthansa responded to the report by stating that “[o]nly strong and competitive companies are in a position to invest in new technologies and further climate protection measures. In Germany, for example, airlines are burdened threefold by the aviation tax, the ETS and CORSIA, while airlines from Turkey, the Gulf states and Asia operate under completely different environmental and social standards.”

The report highlights further lobbying that opposed EU-wide and national-level taxes on jet fuel, and a counter campaign against the flygskam (flight shame) movement. The research also shows the lobbying has yielded results. In early 2020, according to the new report, IATA called on the EC to work within the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to alter CORSIA because of the pandemic. This eventually came to pass in June 2020.

The InfluenceMap report also shows that airlines lobbied against EC plans to announce a mandate next month on their use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), biofuels made from animal waste and cooking oil. The biofuels are seen as a key short-term way to bring down aviation emissions but are currently estimated at only 0.05 per cent of aviation fuel use in the EU, and even less globally.

Emails obtained by InfluenceMap reveal AirFrance told EC officials in March that the mandate should only happen when “the SAF market is mature enough”, warning a mandate risked price spikes due to scarcity of the biofuel. Meanwhile, further emails obtained by InfluenceMap through FOI requests reveal Lufthansa warned the EC in January and February that biofuels obligation could undermine a “level playing field between European and non-European airlines”.

A4E said in a statement that the report fails to reflect the collective actions and investments made by European airlines to address climate change. “We are committed to accelerating our carbon emission reductions to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and have a roadmap that provides robust evidence on how we’re reducing our carbon footprint by 2030 and 2050,” A4E said.

“The aviation industry is mitigating its climate change impact with a global approach based on new technology, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), better infrastructure, more efficient operations and CORSIA,” IATA said.

Other companies mentioned in the report had not responded to żìĂš¶ÌÊÓƔ‘s request for comment at the time of publication.

The revelations come shortly after US airline United that it was buying at least 15 supersonic planes from plane manufacturer Boom Supersonic, which it claimed would be the “first large commercial aircraft to be net-zero carbon from day one” through use of SAF.

However, the move was criticised by non-profit organisations and scientists. “We are way behind in developing enough SAF to decarbonise subsonic, and so adding back in supersonic is going to make it even more challenging. It is a very slow process to certifyÌęand deploy such fuels,” says at Brussels-based non-profit Transport & Environment.

SAF doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions to zero, and supersonic air travel consumes around five times or more fuel than subsonic flight. “Using a typical biofuel [on a supersonic plane] will generally emit at least as much CO2 per passenger as a subsonic plane flying on fossil jet fuel,” says at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a US non-profit organisation.

will also increase supersonic planes’ climate impact via so-called non-CO2 effects that can cause warming, which include increasing the levels of water vapour higher in the atmosphere, as well as levels of particulates and nitrous oxide produced by engines. at the University of Reading, UK, says the worst non-CO2 effect of supersonic flights will be from water vapour, which could stay around for years rather than days as it does at the height subsonic planes fly.