Forests Are Burning and Roads May Fall Apart

                                              Jaume Sellart/EPA

Europe is in the grip of a record setting heat wave.  A massive forest fire in Spain continues driven by hot dry air from Africa.  In Germany, a speed limit has been implemented on sections of the autobahn due to concerns the intense temperatures could cause cracking in some sections of the usually limit free roadways.

In Spain:

“We’re facing a serious fire on a scale not seen for 20 years,” the region’s interior minister, Miquel Buch, said in a tweet. “It could burn through 20,000 hectares. Let’s be very aware that any carelessness could lead to a catastrophe.”

In Germany:

State authorities are reducing speeds to as low as 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) on some stretches because of fears that the unusually high temperatures could create potentially deadly cracks on Autobahn surfaces, a highways agency spokesman said. Temperatures in Germany on Wednesday could surpass a June high of 38.2 degrees Celsius (101 Fahrenheit), according to the country’s DWD weather service. The all-time record of 40.3 degrees, set in July 2015, could also fall.

European officials and the public clearly understand that this intense heat wave is the product of global climate change. 

Meteorologists blame climate change for sending a blast of air from the Sahara desert into Western Europe. The sweltering heat echoes a sustained drought in 2018 across Germany that halted shipping on the Rhine River, hampered power generation, sparked forest fires and forced the country to import grain for the first time in 24 years. Rising temperatures are making violent convective storms more likely, mirroring a trend in the U.S. Midwest.

In Germany, protesters were arrested at the country's largest open pit coal mine.  They are demanding that Germany accelerate the pace at which coal is phased out of electrical power production.

“Nothing less than our future is at stake,” said Nike Malhaus, spokeswoman for protest group Ende Gelaende. “We are taking the coal phaseout into our own hands, because the government is failing to protect the climate.”

Meanwhile, in the United States of Climate Change Denial:

The Trump administration on Wednesday completed one of its biggest rollbacks of environmental rules, replacing a landmark Obama-era effort that sought to wean the United States's electrical grid off coal-fired power plants and their climate-damaging pollution.