Peter Clack

The summer heatwave gripping southern Europe right now is nothing new — it's an ancient, recurring weather pattern. Media coverage has largely failed to explain what's actually happening. This is a commonplace event with a long history. The classic name for these hot winds (and the associated air masses) blowing northward from the Sahara Desert across the Mediterranean into southern Europe is the Sirocco. It transports warm, dry — and often dusty — air from North Africa. As it crosses the sea, the air picks up moisture, arriving as humid, oppressive conditions over Italy, Spain, Malta, southern France and beyond. Sirocco winds can reach strong or even gale-force speeds. While most common in spring and autumn, they occur in summer too. Effects include Saharan dust outbreaks that can turn skies reddish, produce 'blood rain', spike temperatures, and create discomfort. These events are frequently accompanied by a broad African anticyclone (or 'African heat dome') — a large high-pressure system that pushes hot air northward, driving wider European heatwaves. Saharan dust outbreaks and the Saharan air layer often ride along, carrying fine particles far north and contributing to hazy skies. Far from unusual, these are well-known drivers of summer extremes in the region — as the attached Copernicus image clearly shows with the prominent dust plume streaming toward Italy and beyond.

The summer heatwave gripping southern Europe right now is nothing new — it's an ancient, recurring weather pattern. Media coverage has largely failed to explain what's actually happening. This is a commonplace event with a long history. The classic name for these hot winds (and the associated air masses) blowing northward from the Sahara Desert across the Mediterranean into southern Europe is the Sirocco. It transports warm, dry — and often dusty — air from North Africa. As it crosses the sea, the air picks up moisture, arriving as humid, oppressive conditions over Italy, Spain, Malta, southern France and beyond. Sirocco winds can reach strong or even gale-force speeds. While most common in spring and autumn, they occur in summer too. Effects include Saharan dust outbreaks that can turn skies reddish, produce 'blood rain', spike temperatures, and create discomfort. These events are frequently accompanied by a broad African anticyclone (or 'African heat dome') — a large high-pressure system that pushes hot air northward, driving wider European heatwaves. Saharan dust outbreaks and the Saharan air layer often ride along, carrying fine particles far north and contributing to hazy skies. Far from unusual, these are well-known drivers of summer extremes in the region — as the attached Copernicus image clearly shows with the prominent dust plume streaming toward Italy and beyond.

The heat capacity of the entire atmosphere is equal to just the top 3.5 meters of the world's oceans. Below this surface lies Earth’s true thermal vault. Earth is a water planet, and the oceans cover 71% of the surface to an average depth of 2.3 miles. Global ocean currents carry warm waters from the deep tropics to the northern hemisphere, before returning after a round trip of 1,000 years. Without these currents, northern Europe would be a glacial wilderness, just like Greenland. The scale is colossal. Warm waters from the Roman warm period (240 BC to 400 AD) are still returning to the mid-latitudes. The atmosphere, by comparison, is a gaseous envelope that retains almost no thermal energy, holds a tiny fraction of the planet's carbon, and is largely controlled by ocean dynamics. The deep Pacific itself is so massive that only now it is receiving the cold waters from the Little Ice Age. We aren't starting from scratch; we are mid-cycle in a 4.6-billion-year-old time machine. We’ve also reinvented 'climate'. Once, it was a word for the local weather of robins and sparrows. Now it's a global ideological abstraction. We’ve lost our admiration for the natural world. We count CO₂ in parts per million while ignoring the satellite-proven greening of the Sahel. It’s time to move past the light breezes and offshore winds and look into the ocean depths for answers. Ask yourself, is the 1.4°C warming since 1850 really an unprecedented crisis?

Climate has been utterly hijacked by enraged and misleading media sensationalism. The world may be getting warmer in places, cooler in others - but its also getting greener. The expansion of plant life and global agriculture confirms it—exactly what we should expect to see in the fertile stages of a late interglacial warm period. Local variations across regional climate zones worldwide are part of Earth’s natural variability, not symbols of a runaway crisis. Yet, you wouldn't know it. The media has become a babbling talkfest machine, droning on with messages of doom. Look at the visuals they feed us: media headlines overlaying background maps smeared with blood reds and bright oranges, look at this image of France. Every report screams extreme. No wonder the public is tuning out. The core science has a more balanced story. For example, rising CO₂ does not mean soaring temperatures. As mapped in this image, atmospheric CO₂ is strictly logarithmic. Each additional molecule has less impact than the one before it—a reality the scientific community itself acknowledges in its core equations. It means every doubling of CO₂ delivers a constantly diminishing increment of energy. There are dangers along the way. CO₂ plunged to near-asphyxiation levels of 190 ppm during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago—dangerously close to the 150 ppm floor where plant life dies. Nature itself restored the biosphere—and we are seeing that inbuilt resilience in action once again.

Climate has been utterly hijacked by enraged and misleading media sensationalism. The world may be getting warmer in places, cooler in others - but its also getting greener. The expansion of plant life and global agriculture confirms it—exactly what we should expect to see in the fertile stages of a late interglacial warm period. Local variations across regional climate zones worldwide are part of Earth’s natural variability, not symbols of a runaway crisis. Yet, you wouldn't know it. The media has become a babbling talkfest machine, droning on with messages of doom. Look at the visuals they feed us: media headlines overlaying background maps smeared with blood reds and bright oranges, look at this image of France. Every report screams extreme. No wonder the public is tuning out. The core science has a more balanced story. For example, rising CO₂ does not mean soaring temperatures. As mapped in this image, atmospheric CO₂ is strictly logarithmic. Each additional molecule has less impact than the one before it—a reality the scientific community itself acknowledges in its core equations. It means every doubling of CO₂ delivers a constantly diminishing increment of energy. There are dangers along the way. CO₂ plunged to near-asphyxiation levels of 190 ppm during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago—dangerously close to the 150 ppm floor where plant life dies. Nature itself restored the biosphere—and we are seeing that inbuilt resilience in action once again.

Climate has been utterly hijacked by enraged and misleading media sensationalism. The world may be getting warmer in places, cooler in others - but its also getting greener. The expansion of plant life and global agriculture confirms it—exactly what we should expect to see in the fertile stages of a late interglacial warm period. Local variations across regional climate zones worldwide are part of Earth’s natural variability, not symbols of a runaway crisis. Yet, you wouldn't know it. The media has become a babbling talkfest machine, droning on with messages of doom. Look at the visuals they feed us: media headlines overlaying background maps smeared with blood reds and bright oranges, look at this image of France. Every report screams extreme. No wonder the public is tuning out. The core science has a more balanced story. For example, rising CO₂ does not mean soaring temperatures. As mapped in this image, atmospheric CO₂ is strictly logarithmic. Each additional molecule has less impact than the one before it—a reality the scientific community itself acknowledges in its core equations. It means every doubling of CO₂ delivers a constantly diminishing increment of energy. There are dangers along the way. CO₂ plunged to near-asphyxiation levels of 190 ppm during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago—dangerously close to the 150 ppm floor where plant life dies. Nature itself restored the biosphere—and we are seeing that inbuilt resilience in action once again.

The Earth is greening at a rate never seen before in all recorded history. Global crop yields have risen 15–20% since 1960, almost entirely attributable to CO₂ fertilisation (Idso, 2013; IPCC AR6 WG1 Ch5). Famine deaths have fallen over a time when the world's population doubled — and CO₂ deserves much of the credit. We have CO₂ to thank for this explosion in plant life and agriculture. NASA satellite studies reveal a more than 18% increase in global leaf area in 40 years; the largest gains in India and China (from CO₂ fertilisation). Warmer temperatures are lengthening the growing seasons. This is a feature of rising levels of water vapour and cloud cover around the world. Every 100 ppm increase in CO₂ typically boosts plant growth by 25–50% in all non-water-limited conditions. My analysis draws on 776 studies from 1993–2019, showing an ideal average CO₂ level of 550 ppm delivers a 38% increase in global biomass. It's an astonishing windfall for life on earth, chiefly from CO₂, a trace gas at 420 ppm (or 0.04%). It also has a secondary benefit for life by contributing to baseline levels of warmth around the planet, along with water vapour and other trace gases with similar properties, like methane (1,920-1,930 parts per billion). Higher CO₂ gives a net benefit to life on Earth.

🚨 NEW: A wildfire has broken out in North Wales following the latest heatwave A major incident has been declared