Europe’s Worst Drought and Heatwave Ever

Mike Jonas,

The media is full of news about the current drought and heatwave in Europe. “Unprecedented” (they love that word), “worst ever“, and so on and endlessly so on.

“Europe’s unprecedented early summer heatwave may be responsible for hundreds of excess deaths, according to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO).” – BBC

“European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis, scientists say” – Guardian headline. It goes on to say “The heatwave scorching western Europe is the most severe and widespread ever and is only possible due to the climate crisis driven by fossil fuel burning, scientists have said.“.

“Europe’s heatwave is the hottest and most humid ever” – New Scientist article headline (paywalled).

As usual, the media rush to panic the public and are careful not to look for any information that might spoil their story of existential calamity (if it bleeds, it leads).

So – what does history say? I didn’t have to wait long for the answer, thanks to today’s AI-based search engines: 15 seconds.  In 2014, Wetter et al published a paper: The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case. Admittedly the paper was comparing the megadrought of 1540 with the European and Russian droughts of 2003 and 2010, but it is hard to believe from their description that the current European drought is any worse. It is also very hard to believe that the current European drought is so much worse than the 1540 megadrought that it is evidence of a man-made existential threat. And it is extremely hard to believe that any media outlet has carefully checked the reported 1540 heat and drought against the 2026 heat and drought to make sure that their use of “unprecedented”, “worst ever” etc is accurate.

Wetter et al (2014) is pay-walled by Springer, so I can only quote from the Abstract. OK, it’s not all that long – here is the whole Abstract:

The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring–summer temperatures for WE resulted in the likelihood of significantly higher temperatures in 1540. In order to check the plausibility of this result we investigated the severity of the 1540 drought by putting forward the argument of the known soil desiccation-temperature feedback. Based on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources originating from an area of 2 to 3 million km2, we show that Europe was affected by an unprecedented 11-month-long Megadrought. The estimated number of precipitation days and precipitation amount for Central and Western Europe in 1540 is significantly lower than the 100-year minima of the instrumental measurement period for spring, summer and autumn. This result is supported by independent documentary evidence about extremely low river flows and Europe-wide wild-, forest- and settlement fires. We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.

Implicit confirmation of Wetter et al’s findings comes from a perhaps unexpected source – a published criticism of the paper. Alongside the paper are an Erratum and a Commentary. The Erratum is just minor corrections to author details.  The Commentary, though, criticises the paper for not citing an earlier proxy study that identified low precipitation amounts in 1540: “[Wetter et al]‘s conclusion regarding the inability of natural proxy archives to record climate extremes is not defensible“. My thinking is that if they thought the main thrust of the paper was wrong, they would have said so, but all they could claim was that the authors missed a proxy study that confirmed it.

The situation in Europe is pretty bad, and I am sure I speak for everyone in wishing Europe well in what are very challenging conditions. But that is where the climate narrative today is so damaging. Instead of addressing weather/climate rationally, everything bad is blamed on fossil fuels so that politicians continually make bad decisions and resources are diverted away from where they are really needed. As always, climate change alarmism is more damaging than global warming.