The man who keeps Ireland bang up to date on sunshine and rainfall, Alan O’Reilly from Carlow Weather, is now issuing alerts to his followers on how Europe is doing in a new era of weather extremes.
In the past, he would get an occasional query via social media channels on the likelihood of rain in Spain from someone about to go on holiday; now it’s a great many and heat is the main concern.
As for the summer of 2025, he says Ireland has had a typical one, in sharp contrast to Europe and even southeast England with temperature dials tipping 35 degrees, though it looks like next door on a map.
Carlow Weather, with 150,000 followers on X, started sharing European weather alerts because of unusual patterns, especially in Spain, O’Reilly says. “To see 40 degrees being broken in June is unusual. I don’t think people realise how unusual that is.”
RM Block
A lot of people have been messaging him to say it was too warm there and they had to stay indoors and use air conditioning, especially those with children.
While O’Reilly’s accounts of holidaymakers burning up is anecdotal, climate models are predicting southeast England may soon see 40 degrees.
“The level of heat has gone up a notch ... and locals are suffering,” says O’Reilly, who relies on established sources of climate and weather data.
Ireland had the sunniest May on record this year but the remainder of the summer was a mix of sunny spells and spurts of rain. The “Azores high” pressure system – “the Holy Grail for an Irish summer” – did not sit over us, O’Reilly points out. Ireland was on the cooler side of Europe’s oppressive “heat dome” though its pulses of warm air came close.
Met Éireann recorded above average temperatures in July, with record highs in the northwest. The hottest day was July 12th, reaching 31.1 degrees at Mount Dillon, Co Roscommon.
Globally, O’Reilly believes a tipping point on heat is approaching. “How far it will go, I don’t know.” Heat predicted by parts of the UK are at “a level 10 years ago would have been considered impossible”. Indications for Ireland are more benign though the curve is upwards with warmer nights and longer growing seasons. “We will see a lot more tourists in Ireland to escape the heat,” he says.
[ Searing summer may be telling us the race to halt global warming is lostOpens in new window ]
Much of southern Europe experienced repeated heatwaves this summer, coinciding with wildfires over vast areas. In Spain, they claimed four lives, necessitated evacuation of thousands and incinerated almost 400,000 hectares, an area larger than Mallorca.
In France, its largest wildfire raged in Aude for days, enveloping an area the size of Paris. On August 11th, most of the country was experiencing temperatures touching 40 degrees or more.
A study last year found much of Europe could see up to a tenfold increase in the probability of extreme or out-of-season fires.
The EU’s Joint Research Centre this week reported nearly a million hectares have burnt across Europe since the beginning of the year, five times that of 2024. “A fivefold increase in the area burnt is an absolute catastrophe,” says climate and environmental policy researcher Sadhbh O’Neill.
“What we are witnessing now in Spain and Portugal will occur sooner or later in central and northern Europe. This is no longer a Mediterranean problem but a Europe-wide one,” she says.
This summer has laid bare the deadly reality of the climate crisis, says Clare O’Connor, programme coordinator at Friends of the Earth.
“Across Europe, we’re seeing temperatures hit dangerous levels more frequently. In June alone, extreme heatwaves killed over 2,300 people in just 12 European cities, with research showing two-thirds of those deaths were directly linked to global warming.”
Europe is now the fastest-warming continent on Earth, heating at more than twice the global average, she says. “Ireland has been spared the worst impacts so far but we are not immune. Attribution science leaves no doubt that every big heatwave in the past year has been made worse by climate change fuelled by the fossil fuel industry and intensive agribusiness.”
She adds: “While people across Europe are suffering in extreme heat, we are seeing climate action slowing and becoming watered down.”
Immediate actions must come from the Government, O’Connor says; pausing growth of new data centres “until they can operate within our climate limits”; ruling out new fossil fuel infrastructure and making it accessible and affordable for households to move off fossil fuels.
[ Spain struggles to contain spate of record-breaking wildfiresOpens in new window ]
Europe is boiling yet the European Commission is dismantling key environmental protections under the “omnibus” process in the guise of “simplifying” EU rules, O’Neill says. “And across the continent centrist and even leftist parties are courting voters that are swinging to the right with weak and sometimes anti-environment policies. International co-operation on climate and environment has never been more fragile and is heavily tainted by corporate lobbying.”
“We are now facing into the very worst of the scenarios envisaged by political scientists some years ago: one where climate politics is characterised by ‘dirty nationalism’ – which favours self-interest and exploitation of fossil fuels over deep co-operation and fossil fuel phase outs,” she adds.
The challenge facing current politicians, O’Neill believes, is that they have the responsibility for acting in line with science at a time when rational and evidence-based policymaking seems to be going out of fashion.
The heat dome parked over parts of Europe has finally collapsed. Severe weather is likely to follow with a dumping of vast quantities of rainfall.
Countries around the Mediterranean will be particularly anxious as record sea temperatures risk ferocious Valencia-like storms well into autumn, and Ireland will revert to wet weather and dealing with remnants of increasingly turbulent hurricanes as Atlantic weather systems dominate.
