Europe, the continent warming faster than any other on Earth, is facing an unprecedented summer of climate-driven disasters, after the European Union’s official climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that Western Europe has just endured the hottest combined June and July ever recorded.
Successive back-to-back heatwaves have baked the region, leaving parched landscapes and severe water shortages that have created near-perfect conditions for out-of-control wildfires to spread. Data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s leading climate monitoring body, shows that the average temperature across Western Europe for the first two months of summer 2025 hit 21.62 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record set just three years ago in 2022.
This new record is a direct reflection of the extraordinary, unrelenting heat that has gripped the region since the start of summer, Copernicus officials noted. Beyond air temperatures, soil moisture levels across Western Europe are already significantly lower than they were during the crippling 2022 drought, one of the most severe water shortages the region has seen in modern history.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts which manages the Copernicus program, emphasized that these conditions offer a clear, stark example of how human-caused climate change is supercharging extreme heat events. “Heat and drought increasingly reinforce one another, creating a feedback loop that makes these events more severe and longer-lasting,” Burgess explained.
Exceptionally dry conditions have been recorded across much of Western and Central Europe in July, stretching from southern Europe’s Spain and France through Central Europe’s Austria and Hungary, and reaching as far north as the United Kingdom, Ireland and parts of Iceland. Major European waterways including the Seine, Rhine and Danube have seen water levels drop to far below normal seasonal averages, disrupting commercial shipping, cutting off water supplies for agricultural irrigation and reducing hydropower output across multiple countries.
The combination of extreme heat and dry vegetation has also created prime wildfire conditions. Climate scientists have long warned that the frequency of extreme fire-prone weather across Europe is rising steadily as global temperatures climb. This summer, France and Spain have already fought the most destructive wildfires the two nations have seen in living memory, with dangerous blazes also spreading across other European nations, as well as western North America, where the U.S. Northwest and Canada have faced severe fire seasons of their own.
Beyond land-based extremes, Copernicus also announced that global ocean surface temperatures hit a new record high in July, marking the second consecutive month that this benchmark has been broken. The record warmth is being driven by widespread marine heatwaves around European coastlines and a rapidly strengthening El Niño event developing across the tropical Pacific Ocean.
The global average sea surface temperature for July hit 20.96 degrees Celsius, surpassing the previous record set in 2023. Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, told reporters on August 5 that while parts of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic are running far above average temperatures, the developing El Niño is the primary driver of the new global ocean heat record. “We are now facing a very large El Niño — possibly unprecedented in terms of its amplitude,” Buontempo said. “It is clear that the contribution coming from the tropical Pacific becomes quite important.”
El Niño is the warm phase of a natural Pacific climate cycle that temporarily raises tropical ocean temperatures and alters global weather patterns, increasing the risk of extreme drought and flooding across many regions. It also adds extra heat to a planet already warmed by centuries of fossil fuel burning that has pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
El Niño events typically reach their peak strength at the end of the calendar year, before stored ocean heat is released into the atmosphere, pushing up global average temperatures. The previous major El Niño event helped make 2023 the second-hottest year on record globally, and 2024 the hottest. Buontempo said climate researchers now expect a new global average temperature record to be set either later this year or by early 2027.
On a global scale, July 2025 tied for the second-warmest July ever recorded, with an average surface air temperature 1.47 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline from 1850 to 1900, the benchmark used to measure progress toward global climate targets. The last 11 consecutive years are already the 11 hottest years ever recorded, and Buontempo noted that current temperatures are outside the range that modern human civilization has ever experienced. “We have not seen a climate that warm during our lifetime, and very possibly our civilisation,” he said, adding that the primary driver of this ongoing warming remains the rising concentration of greenhouse gases from human activity.
Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat generated by humanity’s carbon emissions, making them the planet’s primary natural climate regulator. But rising ocean temperatures come with severe cascading risks: hotter oceans fuel more intense tropical storms, increase extreme rainfall events, and cause widespread coral bleaching that destroys critical marine ecosystems.
Copernicus generates its climate data using billions of measurements from satellites, land-based weather stations and ocean monitoring sensors, with a consistent temperature record extending back to 1940, making it one of the most trusted regional and global climate monitoring sources in the world.