Europe was hit by a heat wave, and of course the climate crowd is claiming it is proof of global warming, climate change, excessive CO₂ emissions, and the need to stop eating meat and stop using oil. Another option, however, is to recognize that periods of unusually high and low temperatures have always existed.
Some years summer arrives late, and some years it arrives early. Some years you cannot swim in July, while in others you are sweltering in September. The weather has always been variable. A rational response to this heat wave would simply be to go to the beach.
The peak of the May 2026 European heat wave passed earlier this week. The most extreme temperatures occurred between Monday and Wednesday, May 25–27. France broke its national May temperature record, and more than 1,350 station records were broken across the French weather network. All-time May highs were recorded in Bordeaux, Perpignan, Bergerac, Nîmes, Toulouse, and Montpellier.
In other words, records were not broken everywhere. They were broken at specific stations and in specific locations. The crisis, assuming it exists, did not manifest uniformly across France, much less Europe.
Portugal reached 40°C (104°F), Spain 38°C (100.4°F), and temperatures across Western Europe ran 10–15°C (18–27°F) above normal for late May.
By the end of the week, temperatures had dropped across much of the continent, with elevated readings lingering across the Mediterranean, Italy, central Europe, and the Balkans.
The media response followed a familiar pattern. Carbon Brief, aggregating coverage from the Guardian, BBC, Associated Press, and CNN. Experts cited by those outlets called it “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that human-caused climate change made the event more likely and severe.
The UN climate chief called it a “brutal reminder of the cost of global warming.” The UN climate chief also knows that his job depends on continued belief in a climate crisis. French media declared it an “unequivocal sign of global warming.”
The fact that some places were temporarily hotter for one week than they were the previous year is not proof of global warming. These claims rest on assumptions that the underlying data does not support.
Breaking a May temperature record is not the same as breaking an all-time temperature record. When outlets report that a record has been “shattered,” they rarely specify what record. There is a substantial difference between the hottest day ever recorded in Europe and the hottest May 26th ever recorded at a specific station. The second claim compares one data point against roughly 150 years of readings for that calendar date at that location.
Hellbound and Down 