B.C. climate news: How sustainable are Vancouver's AI data centres going to be? | Spring heat dome scorches parts of UK, Europe

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Another tourist favourite, the Okanagan with its vast vineyards and lakeside resorts, also faces drought and elevated wildfire risk with a snowpack at just 16 per cent of normal.

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“Without a doubt the area that’s most concerning and is a record low this year is the Okanagan,” said Jonathan Boyd, a hydrologist with B.C.’s River Forecast Centre. “The Okanagan was in a deficit for precipitation for the whole fall and winter, and that’s the area where I think the most critical focus is for the potential impact for drought.”

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—Tiffany Crawford

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A man in the UK buys water during this week’s record-breaking heat wave. Photo by Dan Kitwood /Getty Images

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For a lot of Londoners trying to work from home a day or two a week, the latest heat wave is turning into a major headache.

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On Monday, Britain had its earliest ever tropical night of the season, defined as a temperature above 20 C. On Tuesday, the daytime temperature soared above 35 C, a record for the time of year. Both extremes were registered in the country’s capital.

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Gary Woodward, managing director of Airconco, an air conditioning installer based in north London, says his company is now booked out until the end of the summer.

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“Even if people are only working two or three days a week from home, they’re still sitting in a converted bedroom, spare room,” Woodward said. It only takes “two or three days of extremely hot weather in which people start to become uncomfortable and unable to work, unable to sleep” for demand to shoot up, he said.

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With the U.K. experiencing a faster pace of warming than the global average, having access to effective cooling systems is increasingly turning into a necessity.

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—Bloomberg News

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A person protects from the sun under an umbrella in front of the Louvre museum in Paris as a record-breaking early heatwave scorches a swathe of western Europe on May 28, 2026. Photo by SIMON WOHLFAHRT /AFP via Getty Images

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Heat dome affecting Europe is ‘unprecedented and historic:’ reports

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British and European news outlets are reporting an unusual spring heat dome is scorching parts of the continent.

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Euronews is reporting that experts are calling the heat dome unprecedented and historic. The report says temperatures reached 35 C near London, 39 C in some areas of France and that Britain is facing the warmest May on record.

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France 24 reports that a red alert warning was issued Thursday for Rome because of the heat wave. The media outlet is also reporting a spike in hospitalizations as temperatures hit over 40 C in the central town of Mora on Wednesday.

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According to the BBC, hundreds of heat records have been broken in France while the U.K.’s Met Office called temperatures over 35 C on Tuesday exceptional for the country even in the middle of summer.

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Germany, Spain and Switzerland are also experiencing an unusually hot spring, according to the reports.

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The reports are all calling this heat wave a heat dome, which is where an area of high pressure gets stuck, trapping warm air underneath. B.C. experienced a deadly heat dome in 2021, when temperatures soared over 40 C in many areas, including Lytton which hit a record 49.6 C.

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In a statement, United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said the heat dome was a brutal reminder of the spiralling impacts of the climate crisis.

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“The science is clear that human-induced climate change is making these heatwaves more frequent and extreme,” Stiell said.

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—Tiffany Crawford

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A damp towel hangs from a barred window, a fan churns the muggy air: Inmates at the overcrowded Villepinte prison outside Paris say enduring a heatwave that has stifled France in recent days in cramped cells is “inhumane.”