‘It can’t withstand the heat’: fears ‘stable’ Patagonia glacier in irreversible decline. Scientists say Perito Moreno, which for decades defied trend of glacial retreat, now rapidly losing mass

 

The Perito Moreno glacier has lost 1.92 sq km of ice cover in the past seven years. Photograph: Walter Diaz/AFP/Getty Images

  

 by María de los Ángeles Orfila

 

One of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.

Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year.

For decades, Perito Moreno defied the global trend of glacial retreat, maintaining an exceptional balance between snow accumulation and melting. Its dramatic calving events, when massive blocks of ice crashed into Lago Argentino, became a symbol of natural wonder, drawing millions of visitors to southern Patagonia.

Dr Lucas Ruiz, a glaciologist at the Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, said: “The Perito Moreno is a very particular, exceptional glacier. Since records began, it stood out to the first explorers in the late 19th century because it showed no signs of retreat – on the contrary, it was advancing. And it continued to do so until 2018, when we began to see a different behaviour. Since then, its mass loss has become increasingly rapid.”

Scientists and local guides warn that the balance is beginning to shift. “The first year the glacier didn’t return to its previous year’s position was 2022. The same happened in 2023, again in 2024, and now in 2025. The truth is, the retreat continues. The glacier keeps thinning, especially along its northern margin,” said Ruiz. This sector is the farthest from tourist walkways and lies above the deepest part of Lago Argentino, the largest freshwater lake in Argentina.

Calving events at Perito Moreno, when ice collapses into the lake, are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. Photograph: Philipp Rohner/Getty Images/500px

The summer of 2023-24 recorded a maximum temperature of 11.2C, according to meteorological data collected by Pedro Skvarca, a geophysical engineer and the scientific director of the Glaciarium centre in El Calafate, Patagonia. Over the past 30 years, the average summer temperature rose by 1.2C, a change significant enough to greatly accelerate ice melt.

Ice thickness measurements are equally alarming. Between 2018 and 2022, the glacier was thinning at a rate of 4 metres a year. But in the past two years, that has doubled to 8 metres annually.

“Perito Moreno’s size no longer matches the current climate; it’s simply too big. It can’t withstand the heat, and the current ice input isn’t enough to compensate,” Ruiz said.

Ice that once rested on the lakebed owing to its weight, said Ruiz, had now thinned so much that it was beginning to float, as water pressure overtook the ice’s own.

With that anchor lost, the glacier’s front accelerates – not because of increased mass input from the accumulation zone, where snow compacts into ice, but because the front slides and deforms. This movement triggers a feedback loop that further weakens the structure, making the process potentially irreversible.

Xabier Blanch Gorriz, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, who studies ice calving at the Perito Moreno glacier front, said: “Describing the change as ‘irreversible’ is complex, because glaciers are dynamic systems. But the truth is that the current rate of retreat points to a clearly negative trend.” He added: “The glacier’s retreat and thinning are evident and have accelerated.”

Ruiz confirmed another disturbing trend reported by local guides: calving events are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. In April, a guide at Los Glaciares national park described watching a tower of ice the height of a 20-storey building collapse into the lake. “It’s only in the last four to six years that we’ve started seeing icebergs this size,” he told Reuters.

In January of this year, Blanch Gorriz and his team installed eight photogrammetric systems that capture images every 30 minutes, enabling the generation of 3D models of about 300 metres of the glacier front. Initial comparisons between December and June already reveal significant ice loss. Satellite images further highlight a striking retreat over just 100 days.

Today, nothing seems capable of halting the glacier’s retreat. Only a series of cooler summers and wetter winters might slow the trend, but climate projections point in the opposite direction.

“What we expect is that, at some point, Perito Moreno will lose contact with the Magallanes peninsula, which has historically acted as a stabilising buttress and slowed the glacier’s response to climate change. When that happens, we’ll likely see a catastrophic retreat to a new equilibrium position, farther back in the narrow valley,” said Ruiz.

Such a shift would represent a “new configuration” of the glacier, raising scientific questions about how this natural wonder would behave in the future. “It will be something never seen before – even farther back than what the first researchers documented in the late 19th century,” Ruiz nadded.

How long the glacier might hold that future position remains unknown. But what scientists do know is that the valley, unlike the Magallanes peninsula, would not be able to hold the glacier in place.

Perito Moreno – Latin America’s most iconic glacier and part of a Unesco world heritage site since 1981 – now joins a regrettable local trend: its neighbours, the Upsala and Viedma glaciers, have retreated at an astonishing rate over the past two decades. It is also part of a global pattern in which, as Ruiz put it, humanity is “digging the grave” of the world’s glaciers.

 

Accelerated glacial melt and monsoon rains trigger deadly floods in Pakistan. Record temperatures and seasonal downpours raise fears of a repeat of the devastating flooding in 2022

 

Commuters negotiate a flooded street after heavy monsoon rains in Lahore on Wednesday. Photograph: Murtaza Ali/AFP/Getty Images

 

Shah Meer Baloch in Islamabad

 

 

Glaciers across northern Pakistan have been melting at an accelerated pace as a result of record-breaking summer temperatures, leading to deadly flash flooding and landslides.

The floods and heavy monsoon rains have caused devastation across the country this summer, killing at least 72 people and injuring more than 130 since the rains began in late June.

In the country’s mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan, temperatures have risen as high as 48.5C (119.3F), which local officials described as unprecedented in a region that is more than 1,200 metres above sea level and famous for its snow-capped mountains. The previous record was 47 degrees, set in 1971.

The region, which spans the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram mountain ranges, has witnessed an acceleration in the melting of its glaciers in the past week.

 

It has led to the swelling of the local rivers and the formation of unstable lakes that have burst, triggering flash floods and landslides that have washed away villages and roads, cutting off some communities entirely and leaving others without power or drinking water.

The head of Gilgit-Baltistan’s disaster management authority, Zakir Hussain, said the region was facing a “very serious situation” and described the fast formation of volatile glacial lakes as “highly hostile” to people’s safety.

He said those in some areas close to the glaciers were being evacuated from their homes. “We are facing a flood situation in many areas,” he said. “The rise of temperature has sent a shiver down our spines. We have never before witnessed such weather here.”

He said it could be just the beginning and that the region remained on high alert as warnings of high temperatures continued.

There are about 7,200 glaciers in Gilgit-Baltistan, though their number and size has diminished over recent years as a result of the climate emergency. The glaciers feed vital river basins and are an essential part of Pakistan’s water supply.

Tariq Ali, a resident in Gilgit, said the flash floods and high temperatures had devastated swathes of agricultural land, which most people relied on for their livelihoods.

“It is like hell,” said Ali. “There has been no rain for quite some time, we are only seeing heatwaves and are witnessing very serious ice-melting. I personally have never witnessed such summer conditions in Gilgit.”

 

Pakistan, with a population of 240 million, is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the effects of the climate crisis, facing erratic rains and a high risk of floods and severe heatwaves. . Devastating flash floods in 2022 killed at least 1,700 people and affected more than 33 million.

Experts say the country may be facing a repeat of the 2022 floods. Punjab province has recorded heavy rainfall in recent days, resulting in urban flooding. The authorities have said above-average rainfall will continue in the coming days.

A family died while on holiday last month after they were swept away by the Swat River in northern Pakistan after heavy rains and flash floods.

Pakistan’s former climate change minister Sherry Rehman said not enough was being done to prepare and protect the country. “We are at the epicentre of a global climate polycrisis,” she wrote on X. “Pakistan is now number one in 2025 as the most climate-impacted country. That’s huge. But do you see alarm bells ringing? I don’t.”

 

Desperate search for girls swept away at summer camp after dozens killed in floods. At least 27 people have died and 27 girls who were at a Christian summer camp are missing

 

Rescue workers along the Guadalupe River in the wake of flooding event in Kerrville, Texas. Photograph: San Antonio Express-News/Express-News/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

 Theguardian

Twenty-seven people confirmed dead in Texas

Twenty seven people are confirmed dead after flooding in Texas.

Eighteen are adults and nine are children, an official from Kerr County said.

“We are working hard to locate anyone who is still missing and ensure they are safe,” Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said.

Some 850 people have been rescued so far.

 

As the World Warms, Extreme Rain Is Becoming Even More Extreme

Even in places, like Central Texas, with a long history of floods, human-caused warming is creating the conditions for more frequent and severe deluges.

A person overlooks flooding at the Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas, on Saturday.Credit...Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

By Raymond Zhong

Colossal bursts of rain like the ones that caused the deadly flooding in Texas are becoming more frequent and intense around the globe as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet, scientists say.

Warm air holds more moisture than cool air, and as temperatures rise, storms can produce bigger downpours. When met on the ground with outdated infrastructure or inadequate warning systems, the results can be catastrophic.

These were the ingredients for tragedy in Texas, a state that is well acquainted with weather extremes of all kinds: high heat and deep cold, deluges and droughts, tornadoes and hurricanes, hail and snow. Indeed, the Hill Country, the part of the state where the Guadalupe River swelled on Friday, is sometimes called “flash flood alley” for how at risk it is to seemingly out-of-nowhere surges of water.

Humid air blows into the area from two main sources, the Gulf of Mexico and the tropical Pacific Ocean. When this air collides with cool air drifting down across the Great Plains, severe storms can erupt. The hilly terrain and steep canyons quickly funnel the rain into river valleys, transforming lazy streams into roaring cascades.

In parts of Texas that were flooded on Friday, the quantities of rain that poured down in a six-hour stretch were so great that they had less than a tenth of 1 percent chance of falling there in any given year, according to data analyzed by Russ Schumacher, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.

 

The Guadalupe River rose from three feet to 34 feet in about 90 minutes, according to data from a river gauge near the town of Comfort, Texas. The volume of water exploded from 95 cubic feet per second to 166,000 cubic feet per second.

And the warming climate is creating the conditions in Texas for more of these sharp, deadly deluges.

In the eastern part of the state, the number of days per year with at least two inches of rain or snow has increased by 20 percent since 1900, according to the most recent National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the United States. Across Texas, the intensity of extreme rain could increase another 10 percent by 2036, according to a report last year by John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist.

To understand patterns of heavy rain at a more local level, communities and officials rely on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agency has for decades published nationwide estimates of the probabilities of various precipitation events — that is, a certain number of inches falling in a particular location over a given amount of time, from five minutes to 24 hours to 60 days.

Engineers use NOAA’s estimates to design storm drains and culverts. City planners use them to guide development and regulations in flood-prone areas.

NOAA’s next updates to the estimates are scheduled to be released starting next year. For the first time, they are expected to include projections of how extreme precipitation will evolve as the climate changes, in order to help officials plan further ahead.

But in recent months, the Trump administration has cut staff at the agency and at the National Weather Service, which sits within NOAA. The administration has also dismissed the hundreds of experts who had been compiling the next edition of the National Climate Assessment, which was scheduled to come out in 2028. And it is proposing deep cuts to NOAA’s 2026 budget, including eliminating the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which conducts and coordinates climate research.

Italy limits outdoor work as heatwave breaks records across Europe. Portugal and Spain suffer historic temperature highs for June, as French schools close because of heat

 

A man takes a break in the heat as he works at a road construction site in Milan. Photograph: Luca Bruno/AP

 

Outdoor working has been banned during the hottest parts of the day in more than half of Italy’s regions as an extreme heatwave that has smashed June temperature records in Spain and Portugal continues to grip large swathes of Europe.

The savage temperatures are believed to have claimed at least three lives, including that of a small boy who is thought to have died from heatstroke while in a car in Catalonia’s Tarragona province on Tuesday afternoon.

In Palermo, Sicily, a 53-year-old woman died on Monday after fainting while walking along a street. She had reportedly suffered from a heart condition.

A 70-year-old man was reported to have drowned at a tourist resort close to Turin as intense heat gave way to storms and flash floods.

Admissions to hospital emergency units in parts of Italy have risen by 15-20% in recent days. The majority of patients are elderly people suffering from dehydration.

The heatwave, which has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from their homes in Turkey due to wildfires, has also forced the closure of schools in parts of France – as education unions warned the classrooms were dangerously hot for children and teachers.

The top of the Eiffel Tower was closed to tourists amid the high temperatures in Paris. Photograph: Tom Nicholson/Reuters

 Tourists, meanwhile, were confronted with closures of some of Europe’s popular attractions. The top of the Eiffel Tower was shut as temperatures in Paris were poised to hit 38C (100.4F). In Brussels, the Atomium monument, famed for its giant stainless steel balls, closed early as temperatures inched towards 37C.

Paris is on red alert for high temperatures, with the top of the Eiffel Tower shut, polluting traffic banned and speed restrictions in place as a searing heatwave grips Europe. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images

 

In Italy, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, two industrial hubs, announced they were stopping open-air work between 12.30pm and 4pm, joining 11 other regions – stretching from Liguria in the north-west to Calabria and Sicily in the south – that have imposed similar bans in recent days.

Local authorities were heeding advice from trade unions after the death of Brahim Ait El Hajjam, a 47-year-old construction worker, who collapsed and died while working on a building site close to Bologna, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, on Monday.

 

Two workers fell ill on Tuesday on a construction site near Vicenza in Veneto. One is reportedly in a coma.

The CGIL Bologna and Fillea CGIL unions said in a statement: “While we wait to learn the actual cause of death, it is essential, during this terrible period, to promote a culture of safety.

“The climate emergency has clearly worsened the conditions for those who work outside every day and companies must give absolute priority to the protection of workers.”

The French national rail operator SNCF said train travel between France and Italy had been suspended for “at least several days” after violent storms on Monday, AFP reported.Cogne, a town in Italy’s Aosta Valley that suffered severe flooding in June last year, has been cut off by a landslide.

The Spanish state meteorological agency, Aemet, said in a social media update that “June 2025 smashed records” when it came to high temperature, with an average temperature of 23.6C, 0.8C above the previous hottest June in 2017.

The monthly average was also 3.5C higher than the average over the period from 1991 to 2020, it said.

A man drinks from a fountain during hot weather in Naples. Photograph: Ansa/Ciro Fusco/EPA

The agency’s comments come just days after Spain’s highest ever June temperature of 46C was recorded in the Huelva province of Andalucía.

In Portugal, temperatures hit 46.6C in Mora, a town in the Évora district, in recent days, making it the highest June temperature ever recorded in the country, according to the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere.

In France, the prime minister, François Bayrou, tried to calm anger at the heatwave crisis in French schools. More than 1,896 schools across the country were fully or partially closed on Tuesday.

In Paris, which was on maximum heatwave alert, parents were advised to keep their children at home on Tuesday and Wednesday. Some other towns, including Troyes and Melun, closed all their schools.

Bayrou said the education ministry would open talks with mayors on how to adapt school buildings, most of which are extremely poorly insulated.

As temperatures rose on Tuesday, some Paris teachers had nothing more than a water spray on their desk to repeatedly spritz children in classrooms in the hope of keeping cool.

Several Spanish regions, including Barcelona, were on alert for exceptionally high temperatures as the first heatwave of the summer hit the country. Photograph: Alejandro García/EPA

  

Bayrou, who is facing a vote of no confidence on Tuesday, which he is expected to survive, has cancelled his meetings to monitor the situation in real time.

The hot weather front known in Germany as Bettina is expected to have nearly the entire country in its grip by Wednesday, with temperatures shooting toward the 40C mark and only the coasts and Alpine peaks spared the scorching temperatures.

Industry groups warned that schools, elderly care homes and hospitals were ill-prepared for the heatwave – an urgent issue they said must be addressed as the frequency of life-threatening weather increases.

Other cities across Europe are also experiencing higher than usual temperatures, including Zaragoza (39C), Rome (37C), Madrid (37C), Athens (37C), Brussels (36C), Frankfurt (36C), Tirana (35C) and London (33C).

Turkey’s forestry minister, İbrahim Yumaklı, said firefighters had been called out to 263 wildfires across the country in recent days. Firefighters have also been tackling wildfires in parts of France and Italy, especially on the islands of Sardinia and Sicily.

There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away. Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.

By David Gelles in New York; Somini Sengupta in Brasília and in Tirunelveli, India; Keith Bradsher in Beijing; and Brad Plumer in Washington.

 

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.

At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.

The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.

The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.

 

China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own, so it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.

The dangers for China of relying on politically unstable regions for energy were underscored recently when Israel attacked Iran, which sells practically all its oil exports to China.

While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.

 

China’s biggest automaker, its biggest battery maker and its biggest electronics company have each introduced systems that can recharge electric cars in just five minutes, all but erasing one of the most annoying hassles of E.V.s, the long charging times. China has nearly 700,000 clean energy patents, more than half of the world's total. Beijing’s rise as a clean power behemoth is altering economies and shifting alliances in emerging countries as far afield as Pakistan and Brazil.

The country is also taking steps that could make it hard for other countries, particularly the United States, to catch up. In April, Beijing restricted the export of powerful “rare earth” magnets, a business China dominates, unless they’re already inside fully assembled products like electric vehicles or wind turbines. While China recently started issuing some export licenses for the magnets, the moves signal that the world may face a choice: Buy China’s green energy technology, or do without.

China has also begun to dominate nuclear power, a highly technical field once indisputably led by the United States. China not only has 31 reactors under construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, but has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion, the long-promised source of all-but-limitless clean energy that has bedeviled science for years.

“China is huge,” said Praveer Sinha, chief executive of Tata Power, an Indian conglomerate that makes solar panels in a high-tech factory near the southern tip of the country but relies almost entirely on Chinese-made silicon to make those panels. “Huge means huge. No one in the world can compete with that.”

While China is dominating clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, the Trump administration is using the formidable clout of the world’s biggest economy to keep American oil and gas flowing.

In a full reversal from the Biden administration’s effort to pivot the American economy away from fossil fuels, the Trump White House is opening up public lands and federal waters for new drilling, fast-tracking permits for pipelines and pressuring other countries to buy American fuels as a way of avoiding tariffs.

Washington is essentially pursuing a strong-arm energy strategy, both at home and abroad with allies and friends. It’s premised on the idea that the modern world is already designed around these fuels, and the United States has them in abundance, so exporting them benefits the American economy even if solar energy is cleaner and often cheaper.

 

The competition between the United States and China to sell the world their wares has serious consequences for the health of the planet.

Burning fossil fuels for more than 200 years has helped create the modern world while delivering great prosperity to developed countries such as the United States, which ranks historically as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it has also led to what scientists now say is a growing crisis. The carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of oil, gas and coal acts as a heat-trapping blanket, leading to rapid global warming.

Cheap Chinese-made solar, batteries and E.V.s have made the pivot to cleaner technologies possible for many large economies including Brazil, South Africa and even India, a regional rival to Beijing. That affordability is crucial for bringing down global emissions.

The scientific consensus is that warming, if unchecked, will continue to cause increasingly severe droughts and storms, potentially alter ocean currents and global weather patterns, disrupt food production, deepen a biodiversity crisis and inundate some of the world’s biggest cities as sea levels rise, among other risks.

 

The Trump administration has dismissed those concerns. The United States energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former natural gas executive, has described climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world.”

Asked about the diverging energy pathways of China and the United States, Ben Dietderich, a Department of Energy spokesman, said, “The United States is blessed with an abundant supply of energy resources and the Trump administration is committed to fully utilizing them to meet the growing energy needs of the American people.” Past efforts to encourage cleaner energy like solar or wind, he said, “harmed America’s energy security.”

Amanda Eversole, executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for fossil fuel companies, said her organization monitored Chinese advances and that she was downplaying their strategic threat. “We continue to keep a very close eye on what the Chinese are doing, because we believe it’s in our national security interests and our economic interest to continue to dominate from an American energy perspective,” she said.

The White House declined to comment on energy strategy and China’s advances.

Most of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. Yet as countries try to address the perils of climate change, they’ve been steadily adopting cleaner alternatives. By 2035, solar and wind power are expected to become the two largest sources of electricity production, surpassing coal and natural gas, according to the International Energy Agency.

As the cost of renewables keeps falling, the U.S. strategy may leave China poised to capitalize on the world’s growing appetite for not only cleaner but cheaper power.

“The U.S. will champion a fossil fuel economy, and China will become the leader of the low-carbon economy,” said Li Shuo, who heads the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The question for the U.S. now is, where do you go from here?”

 

 

Spain records temperature of 46C as Europe heatwave continues

 

by 

Danai Nesta Kupemba

BBC News

 

 

A heatwave continues to grip large parts of Europe, with authorities in many countries issuing health warnings amid searing temperatures.

Southern Spain is the worst-affected region, with temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius recorded in Seville and neighbouring areas.

A new heat record for June of 46C was set on Saturday in the town of El Granado, according to Spain's national weather service, which also said this month is on track to be the hottest June on record.

Red heat warnings are in force in parts of Portugal, Italy and Croatia, with numerous amber warnings covering areas of Spain, France, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Hungary, Serbia, Slovenia and Switzerland. 

 

In Barcelona, a woman died after completing a shift as a road sweeper on Saturday, when temperatures were very high. Local authorities are investigating her death.

In Italy, emergency departments across the country have reported an uptick in heatstroke cases, mainly affecting "elderly people, cancer patients, or homeless people", Mario Guarino, vice president of the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine told the AFP news agency.

Hospitals such as the Ospedale dei Colli in Naples have set up dedicated heatstroke pathways to speed up access to vital treatments such as cold water immersion.

The city of Bologna further to the north has set up seven climate shelters with air conditioning and drinking water, while Rome has offered free access to city swimming pools for those over 70.

Tourists cool off under a cloud of mist in Valencia, Spain on Sunday

A pharmacist in Portugal's capital Lisbon told Reuters news agency that, despite telling people "not to go out" during the hottest hours of the day, "we have already had some cases of heat strokes and burns".

The severe heat has also affected countries across the western Balkans where temperatures have reached in excess of 40C.

Serbia registered its highest-ever temperature since it began recording them in the 19th century. In Slovenia, the hottest-ever June temperature was recorded on Saturday.

North Macedonia is also sweltering as temperatures reached 42C on Friday. 

 

More hot weather to come

Some areas will continue to get hotter until the middle of the week, with temperatures rising across France, Germany, Italy and the UK over the next few days.

Yellow and amber alerts are in place for parts of England this weekend, and temperatures in London may reach 35C on Monday.

The heat has been building under a big area of high pressure, with dry air descending and warming.

As that process has continued over a number of days, temperatures have climbed. The area of high pressure will move eastwards over the next few days – taking the high temperatures northwards and eastwards with it.

While it is hard to link individual extreme weather events to climate change, heatwaves are becoming more common and more intense due to climate change.

Scientists at World Weather Attribution, who analyse the influence of climate change on extreme weather events, say June heatwaves with three consecutive days above 28C are about 10 times more likely to occur now compared to pre-industrial times.

Additional reporting by BBC Weather, Guy DeLauney and Guy Hedgecoe

‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis. Unusually aggressive lone star ticks, common in the south-east, are spreading to areas previously too cold for them

 

A vial of live lone star ticks being displayed. Photograph: Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

by  Oliver Milman

 

Blood-sucking ticks that trigger a bizarre allergy to meat in the people they bite are exploding in number and spreading across the US, to the extent that they could cover the entire eastern half of the country and infect millions of people, experts have warned.

Lone star ticks have taken advantage of rising temperatures by the human-caused climate crisis to expand from their heartland in the south-east US to areas previously too cold for them, in recent years marching as far north as New York and even Maine, as well as pushing westwards.

The ticks are known to be unusually aggressive and can provoke an allergy in bitten people whereby they cannot eat red meat without enduring a severe reaction, such as breaking out in hives and even the risk of heart attacks. The condition, known as alpha-gal syndrome, has proliferated from just a few dozen known cases in 2009 to as many as 450,000 now.

 

“We thought this thing was relatively rare 10 years ago but it’s become more and more common and it’s something I expect to continue to grow very rapidly,” said Brandon Hollingsworth, an expert at the University of South Carolina who has researched the tick’s expansion.

“We’ve seen an explosive increase in these ticks, which is a concern. I imagine alpha-gal will soon include the entire range of the tick, which could become the entire eastern half of the US as there’s not much to stop them. It seems like an oddity now but we could end up with millions of people with an allergy to meat.”

The exact number of alpha-gal cases is unclear due to patchy data collection but it’s likely to be a severe undercount as people may not link their allergic reaction to the tick bites. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said around 110,000 cases have been documented since 2010 but acknowledges the true number could be as high as 450,000.

Cases will rise further as the ticks spread, aided by their adaptability to local conditions, according to Laura Harrington, an entomologist and disease specialist at Cornell University. “With their adaptive nature and increasing temperatures, I don’t see many limits to these ticks over time,” she said.

A female lone star tick, or Amblyomma americanum collected in Maryland on 21 Jun 2017. Photograph: BSIP/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Alpha-gal is a confounding condition because it doesn’t cause an immediate allergic reaction, unlike a peanut allergy, with symptoms often appearing several hours after consuming meat. The syndrome is not caused by a pathogen but spurs an allergy to a sugar molecule found in mammals and an array of other things, from toothpaste to medical equipment. Researchers think the condition can wane over time but is also worsened by further tick bites.

This leads to a confusing and fraught experience for the growing number of Americans with alpha-gal, who are now girding for another expected hot summer full of ticks. “The ticks are rampant this year, I’ve pulled 10 ticks off me this season alone, it feels like they are uncontrollable at the moment,” said Heather O’Bryan, a horticulturist in Roanoke, Virginia, who has alpha-gal. “They are so disgusting. I’m not afraid of a lot, but I’m afraid of ticks.”

In 2019, O’Bryan suffered full body hives and struggled to breathe after eating a pork sausage. “It was terrifying experience, I didn’t know I had an allergy but it almost killed me,” she said. She now avoids products containing mammal-derived elements, such as certain toothpastes and even toilet paper, due to adverse reactions.

Dairy, another mammalian product, is also off limits. “I’ve learned what I can eat now, but I was so sad when I realized I couldn’t have pizza again, I remember crying in front of a frozen pizza in the supermarket aisle,” she said.

There is now an “almost constant” stream of new members to the Facebook alpha-gal support groups that O’Bryan is part of, she said, with her region of Virginia now seemingly saturated by the condition. “Everyone knows someone who has it, I talk a friend off a ledge once a month when they’ve been bitten because they are so afraid they have it and are freaking out,” she said.

Lone star ticks are aggressive and can speedily follow a human target if they detect them. “They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, a conservationist who lives in the Washington DC area.

A particular horror is the prospect of brushing up against vegetation containing a massed ball of juvenile lone star ticks, know as a “tick bomb”, that can deliver thousands of tick bites. “They are so tiny you can’t see them but you have to take it seriously or you’ll never get them off you,” said Forsyth, who now carries around a lint roller to remove such clusters.

After being diagnosed with alpha-gal, Forsyth set up online resources about the condition to help spread awareness and advocate for better food labeling to include alpha-gal warnings. “I get calls from doctors asking questions about this because they just don’t know about it,” she said. “I’m not a medical professional, so I just send them the research papers.”

As the climate heats up, due to the burning of fossil fuels, ticks are able to shift to areas that are becoming agreeably warm for them. Growing numbers of deer, which host certain ticks, and sprawling housing development into natural habitats is also causing more interactions with ticks. “Places where houses push up against habitats and parks where nature has regrown are where we are seeing cases,” said Hollingsworth.

But much is still unknown, such as why lone star ticks, which have long been native to the US, suddenly started causing these allergic reactions. Symptoms can also be alarmingly varied – Forsyth said she rarely eats out now because of concerns of contamination in the food and even that alpha-gal could be carried to her airborne, via the steam of cooked meat.

“Some people are scared to leave the house, it’s hard to avoid,” she said. “Many people who get it are over 50, so the first symptom some of them have is a heart attack.”

So how far can alpha-gal spread? Cases have been found in Europe and Australia, although in low numbers, while in the US it’s assumed lone star ticks won’t be able to shift west of the Rocky mountains. But other tick species might also be able to spread alpha-gal syndrome – a recent scientific paper found the western black legged tick and the black legged tick, also called the deer tick, could also cause the condition.

Hanna Oltean, an epidemiologist at Washington state department of health, said it was “very surprising” to find a case of alpha-gal in Washington state from a person bitten by a tick locally, suggesting the western black legged tick could be a culprit.

“The range is spreading and emerging in new areas so the risk is increasing over time,” Oltean said. “Washington state is very far from the range and the risk remains very low here. But we don’t know enough about the biology of how ticks spread the syndrome.”

The spread of alpha-gal comes amid a barrage of disease threats from different ticks that are fanning out across a rapidly warming US. Powassan virus, which can kill people via an inflammation of the brain, is still rare but is growing, as is Babesia, a parasite that causes severe illnesses. Lyme disease, long a feature of the US north-east, is also burgeoning.

“We are dealing with a lot of serious tick-borne illnesses and discovering new ones all the time,” said Harrington.

“There’s a tremendous urgency to confront this with new therapies but the problem is we are going backwards in terms of funding and support in the US. There have been cuts to the CDC and NIH (National Institutes of Health) which means there is decreasing support. It’s a major concern.”