A new record temperature in Europe has been recorded today as dangerous wildfires sweep across the continent.
The city of Syracuse, in Sicily, sizzled at an astonishing 48.8C, topping the previous 48C registered in Athens in 1977.
Sicily’s Agrometeorological Information System (SIAS) said the record was recorded today, daily newspaper Corriere della Sera reports.
Meteorologist Duncan Scott told The Independent that further records will follow.
He said: “A dangerous heatwave spanning much of North Africa and into Southern Europe is unfolding right now. The focus of heat will shift west and north slightly in the coming days. More records are inevitable.”
Sicily has been heavily hit by fires in recent days, with authorities struggling to contain them.
Firefighters said on Twitter they had carried out more than 3,000 operations in Sicily and Calabria in the last 12 hours, employing seven planes to try to douse the flames from above.
"We must immediately respond to this emergency, providing economic relief to those who have lost everything," said Agriculture Minister Stefano Patuanelli.
Fuelled by the hot weather, fires have erupted across southern Europe in recent weeks, with huge damage to the landscape on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Fires ravaged southern Italy today, burning thousands of acres of land and killing a man in his home, as temperatures hit records well above 40C and hot winds stoked the flames.
Multiple blazes erupted in Calabria, the toe of Italy's boot, where a 76-year-old man died after his house collapsed due to the flames, Ansa news agency reported.
"Yet another victim of the fires. We are losing our history, our identity is turning to ashes, our soul is burning," the mayor of Reggio Calabria, Giuseppe Falcomata, wrote on Facebook.
He urged people to keep away from the affected areas.
In Greece, many villages on the Peloponnese peninsula were evacuated today as exhausted firefighters battled wildfires for a ninth consecutive day.
At the other end of the Mediterranean, fires also tore through forested areas of northern Algeria on Wednesday, killing at least 65 people, state television reported.
Yesterday The Mirror reported that global heating is dangerously close to being out of control with humans “unequivocally” to blame.
A new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the starkest alarm bell yet about the speed and scale of the climate emergency, with recent effects from floods to heatwaves.
Drawing on 14,000 scientific studies, it gives the most “devastating” picture yet of the impacts humans are having through activities like burning fossil fuels – and the future we faces if we fail to rapidly tackle the crisis. Its summary reads: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”
Previous IPCC reports only said it was “extremely likely” that industrial activity was to blame, but co-author Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Oxford University, said: “There is no uncertainty language in this sentence, because there is no uncertainty that global warming is caused by human activity and burning of fossil fuels.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “code red for humanity”, adding: “The alarm bells are deafening. This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
