Europe Is Burning

Guest host Zolan Kanno-Youngs talks first with global climate correspondent Chico Harlan about how France and Spain came to fight their largest wildfires on record simultaneously, on the outskirts of Bordeaux and Madrid. The setup began in May with Western Europe's first heat wave of 2026; by late June France had set its hottest day in national history three days running, with temperatures reaching 111 degrees, and the heat kept returning through July. A Spanish public institute counted more than 1,000 excess heat deaths in June alone, with estimates for Western Europe running from 10,000 to 20,000. Harlan explains why Europe is so lethal in the heat: old buildings designed to retain warmth, zinc roofs that turn Paris apartments into ovens, and air conditioning that most Europeans still don't have.

Europe is warming about half a degree Celsius per decade — faster than any other continent — largely because the melting Arctic has swapped reflective ice for dark, heat-absorbing water. Around Bordeaux, a 19th-century decision to plant pine monoculture forests on former swampland created what amounts to a tinderbox once the climate shifted.

Mark Landler then reports from Bordeaux itself: a yellow-orange smoke cloud blotting out the sun, ash falling in the streets, and an airplane-hangar evacuation center filled with hundreds of cots. Over 100,000 acres have burned, the village of La Porche lost some 150 homes, and more than 240,000 people have been evacuated — the largest peacetime evacuation in modern French history. Authorities' top priority is keeping the fires away from factories near Bordeaux that make propellant for France's nuclear missile arsenal. The vineyards, remarkably, haven't burned — they sit east of the river and act as natural firebreaks — but smoke hanging over the vines could taint the entire vintage. The episode closes on Europe's paradox: as the evidence of climate change grows more dramatic, political will for net-zero targets is weakening, and the short-term answer is adaptation — including a French reckoning with air conditioning.