Summer 2025 already a cavalcade of climate extremes

Paris: Record heat, massive fires, deadly floods... August has barely begun, but the summer of 2025 is already marked by a cascade of destructive and...

Paris: Record heat, massive fires, deadly floods... August has barely begun, but the summer of 2025 is already marked by a cascade of destructive and deadly weather in the northern hemisphere.

"Extreme temperatures and precipitation have become more intense and more frequent on a global scale," says Sonia Seneviratne, a professor at ETH Zurich and member of the UN-mandated climate science advisory panel, the IPCC.

"We are in the midst of climate change," Fred Hattermann, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), told AFP.

"The risk of extreme events has increased significantly," he said, noting that 2024 was the first year in which the planet's average surface temperature was 1.6 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial benchmark.