Fire, Field, Firefighter image from Pixabay
As wildfires rampage through parts of France and Spain, causing more than 330,000 people to be evacuated, try this headline for size – “Spain’s far-right party falsely claims wildfires are not linked to climate emergency.”
Of course they do. Perhaps they swallowed the same stupid pills as our own Reform UK. Let’s hear instead from Víctor Resco de Dios, a professor of forestry engineering and global change at the University of Lleida in the Catalan region of Spain. You know, one of those experts the right disparages. Here he is in the Guardian:
Although it’s difficult to predict how far things might go, we will soon be unable to rule out Dantesque scenarios like those seen in California or Australia, with fires or fire complexes reaching hundreds of thousands of hectares or even a million hectares…
That’ll get those climate-denying twerps putting their fingers in their ears and chuntering petrol-flavoured nonsense. For illustration, see how councils run by Reform UK spend more time dismissing the climate crisis than sorting out anything local.
Their equivalent in Spain is the far-right Vox party, which blames the fires on excess vegetation in rural areas, and not enough money being spent on firefighting services.
In a post on X, that favourite haunt of the raving right, Vox said: “It’s not climate change, it’s the lack of clearing of the woodlands and the means to combat the fires.”
Both things can of course be true at the same time. Rampant vegetation, especially after wet winters encourage growth and scorching summers then dry everything to a crisp, can increase the risk of fires. But those fires are in turn fanned by our increasingly unstable climate.
As long ago as 2015 the BBC reported that Spanish scientists were amazed after a fire swept through more than 20,000 hectares of forest in Valencia in 2012. While most trees were charred, in the middle of the devastation, a group of cypresses stood tall and green.
So, yes, there are things we can do to restrict or contain fire. Perhaps cypress trees should be planted amid the all-too-flammable pine trees that rise on those sandy beaches.
But climate instability is still real.
Some of the right will deny this even as the ground beneath their feet burns. And if that brings to mind an image of Nigel Farage wearing pink trousers and hopping around in his yachting shoes as the lawn in one of his houses smoulders, so be it.
But now to France, where the fire in the Gironde region is only nine miles from the outskirts of Bordeaux. As yet the city is not officially under threat, although the fires are approaching the western suburbs.
Back in 2010, at a time of plenty (of freebies), I went on my last press trip. We stayed in Bordeaux for the wine festival but also had a day out on the coast, with a trip to the Bay of Arcachon, where we puffed up the Pilat sand dune, said to be the highest in Europe, then sailed across to Cap Ferret peninsula for a waterside lunch. Later, we were taken in a small boat round the bay.
This week thousands have been forced to flee parts of south-west France, and the authorities gave people in the Cap Ferret 30 minutes to leave, according to BBC journalist Joanna Kent, who was on holiday at a campsite there with her family.
On a visit to a crisis centre in Bordeaux, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, said this was the “toughest” situation the country had dealt with “since the second world war”.
Bordeaux has a population of around 850,000. It’s a lovely city to visit, or it certainly was when I was wined and dined there. Yes, bribes of a food and drink nature were swallowed, for the last time ever as it happens, but it’s still a great city.
The tall classical buildings, once hidden under layers of soot, were cleaned up, as was the once-neglected quayside area on the Garonne river.
The wide boulevards throng with people. None of this happened by accident. The city was transformed by a political act of will from Alain Juppé, the unpopular former prime minister who later became mayor of Bordeaux.
As well as attending the wine festival, we went on outings and tastings around the Gironde region, including to the ancient wine town of Saint-Emilion nestling amid some of the most famous vineyards in the world.
To date the vines around Bordeaux are safe. But a huge area of high pressure, or ‘heat dome, is covering most of Europe and sealing in the dry and hot weather.
Here in the UK we are very much on the edge of all that but the heat is building again across parts of England and Wales. Tomorrow temperatures are forecast to reach 30C in the Midlands, where our heat-averse son lives, while East Anglia and southern England may hit 35C.