Irish Examiner view: Putting the fire out now

Paramedics help people coping with high temperatures at the Colosseum in Rome last week. Storms and wildfires brought on by heatwaves killed seven people in Italy on Tuesday. Picture: Antonio Masiello/Getty

The extreme temperatures seen across the globe in the past month would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change, new scientific research revealed yesterday, but if supporters of rapid climate action thought this would accelerate change in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they were sadly wrong.

Yesterday, World Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists which measures how much climate change influences extreme weather events, said the globe would not be seeing these phenomena “at all” without climate change.