Currently — July 25, 2023: Wildfires force largest evacuation in Greek history

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The weather, currently.

Extreme temperatures reaching 45°C (113°F) amid the hottest July weekend in 50 years in the Greek island of Rhodes helped fan horrific wildfires over the weekend that prompted the largest evacuation in the long history of Greece.

Nearly 20,000 people were forced to seek shelter on the island, with some evacuating by boat ahead of the growing flames. The fires progressed extremely rapidly towards the sea, forcing the evacuation over the span of several hours. The fires look even more horrific from space, with the burn scar covering nearly 10 percent of the island.

Most of those who were evacuated were tourists, some of whom described a “near-death experience”.

The fires are getting a lot of media attention, and rightfully so. The Mediterranean is one of the epicenters of this year’s surge in global temperatures, that have also affected much of eastern North America, as well as China. The Mediterranean heat wave is especially affecting migrants making the dangerous voyage from North Africa to Italy, as Currently has previously reported, and which also recorded its all-time highest temperatures in recent days.

A paper published last year concluded that the "prevalence and extremity of fire weather has already emerged beyond its pre-industrial variability in the Mediterranean due to climate change" — namely that the fires in Greece cannot be explained without the influence of decades of burning fossil fuels.

—Eric Holthaus