B.C. climate news: Province funds Youth Climate Corps B.C. | Europe heat dome pushes temperatures over 40 C

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—Tiffany Crawford

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Firefighters were battling 11 new out-of-control wildfires that broke out Wednesday in B.C., as hot and dry conditions mix with lightning strikes in some areas.

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Two of the new rapidly spreading wildfires that ignited Wednesday are south of Lillooet, including the Riley Creek wildfire, located about 25 kilometres south of Lillooet, which is mapped at about 0.5 square kilometres. The other wildfire is smaller and southwest of Lillooet.

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Both are believed to have been ignited by lightning. Lillooet is located just over 60 kilometres northwest of Lytton, where the Saw Creek wildfire forced evacuations and a highway closure Friday. That fire is considered to be under control as of Tuesday.

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Firefighters were also called out to another quick-moving wildfire that sparked Wednesday evening between Whistler and Pemberton.

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—Tiffany Crawford

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Women cool off in a pool as Spain experiences a heat wave, in Madrid on June 23, 2026, during the heat wave affecting the Iberian Peninsula. Nearly all of Spain was under a heat alert on June 23, with parts of the south and north of the country placed on the highest warning level as a heat wave grips most of western Europe. Temperatures of up to 40C in the shade were forecast in parts of the Basque Country on the border with France, an area where such extreme heat is relatively uncommon. Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO /AFP via Getty Images

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The scorching heat sweeping Europe has parched soils, distressed livestock and is keeping farmers away from fields, superseding the Iran war as the greatest challenge to food supplies.

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In France, record-breaking temperatures are damaging corn crops and wiping out hundreds of thousands of chickens. In Spain, pigs are losing their appetite and some fruit is threatened at the key blossoming stage. In the U.K., distressed cows are producing less milk.

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Though the heat wave will ease by early next week, extreme weather has overshadowed the Middle East conflict as the biggest concern for farmers. Meteorologists are warning of above-normal temperatures for months to come as a developing El Niño compounds the impact of climate change for an industry already facing high fertilizer and fuel costs.

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“The next shock to the farmer is potential adverse weather in some parts of the world,” said Les Finemore, chief investment officer at Moreton Capital Partners, which is starting a fund specifically trading El Niño crop risks. “We’ve been focused on the Iranian war situation. The next event will be El Niño.”

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El Niño — a climate phenomenon that disrupts normal weather patterns every few years — has contributed to the heat wave across western Europe. This week, temperature highs were reached in the U.K. and France, where a record 72 departments are under red heat alerts, with similar warnings in effect in the U.K., Germany and Switzerland.

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—Bloomberg News

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A violinist plays under the hot sun amid a heat wave in Paris on June 21, 2026. According to the World Weather Attribution group of scientists, human-caused climate change is “unequivocally” responsible for the intensity of a record-breaking heat wave scorching Europe. It would have been “virtually impossible” for such exceptional temperatures to occur in June fifty years ago. Photo by CHRISTOPHE DELATTRE /AFP via Getty Images

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Climate crisis making European heat waves much worse in just a few decades, say scientists

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A deadly heat wave pushing some temperatures above 40 C in parts of Europe has been made much worse because of the climate crisis, say scientists with the World Weather Attribution.

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Researchers from Sweden, Denmark, the United States, the Netherlands, Ireland and the United Kingdom collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the extreme heat in Western Europe.

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They said this heat wave is the most severe ever recorded.

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In 2003, the first major heat wave of this century, daytime heat like this would still have been very rare, about 10 times less likely than today, the scientists said while nighttime temperatures such as this June would have been more than a hundred times less likely in 2003.

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The analysis shows that intense heat is increasing rapidly, with such heat waves tens to hundreds of times more likely since only 2003 and virtually impossible just 50 years ago.

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They said a “rapid phaseout of fossil fuels is critical if we are to avoid even higher temperatures and their consequences in the future.”