Wildfires Are Burning Through Europe

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, good morning, everyone. Okay, people, listen up. Before we get today's show really started with the content and everything, I want to share some joyful behind the scenes news. Our longtime producer and sometimes guest host, Amina Serna, welcomed her first baby last week. In fact, she was born just about a week after the last time Amina held down the fort hosting this show. We literally didn't know if we would have radio's first live on air birth back on July 16th, but the baby did her mom her first favor and waited till her actual due date. Thank you, baby Zora. That's the baby's name, Zora. And she and her mom are both doing great. We're so happy for Amina and her husband Paul and just want to give baby Zora a hearty and public welcome to the world.
Now, on Tuesdays, as many of you know, we've been reserving spot for health or climate topics on the show for a few years. That's to make sure that with all the other fast moving headlines that grab everyone's attention from day to day, you know, that we don't let health and climate issues fall through the cracks, especially with climate. As I've said before, the climate doesn't change at the speed of the news cycle. Right? So a commitment to revisit it on a regular basis is, we think, a public service. Today we will do both, one climate segment and one non-climate public health story because things are happening in the news that deserve a look at the underlying science. Later in the hour, we'll go beyond Dr. Anthony Fauci taking the fifth repeatedly before Rand Paul Senate Committee last week, to look at some of the science underlying their rivalry with the public health policy and we'll talk to our guest from Statenews about a nominee of President Trump, also not making the news so much, but the nominee who specifically would be in charge of future pandemic preparedness. We'll do all that coming up.
We'll begin with the latest outbreak of extreme wildfires.
It was Canada a few weeks ago when those fires caused dangerous smoke conditions here in New York and even further south, as you know. Now we turn mostly to the record wildfires in Europe. The way we'll try to go beyond the headlines is this. Wildfires are not new in human history, but the intensity and frequency of them suggest something more systemic is going on, even as one country's government, the one you're probably in right now, that country, is back to going full throttle on promoting fossil fuels and limiting renewables. Here are some of the recent headlines from Europe if you haven't been following. This past July was the driest July in almost 200 years of recorded history for the UK and Wales. In France, a wildfire burned about 420 square kilometers, making it the country's largest wildfire on record. That was in La Pours near Bordeaux in the south, 420 square kilometers, roughly 162 square miles. The city of Paris, just by comparison, is just about 40 square miles to let you get a sense of how big that fire was, four times the size of Paris. France saw what was described as the largest civilian evacuation outside wartime, as more than 224,000 people fled the region. The total number of people displaced from all of southwestern Europe is a lot higher because wildfires have forced evacuations near Madrid too.
Crews are also trying to fight fires near Athens, Greece, and those are just a few examples. It's scary, obviously, and climate change is undeniably a factor here. So to help us make sense of what's happening in Europe, and also compare it to the United States and elsewhere a bit, we'll talk to Chico Harlan, Global Climate Correspondent for The New York Times, usually based in Rome. Chico, thanks for some time today. Welcome to WNYC.

**Chico Harlan** (4:24)
Thank you so much, Brian.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:26)
Where have you been reporting from these last couple of weeks, and what does it feel like on the ground?

**Chico Harlan** (4:31)
Where was I? I mean, I guess, putting the global in my job for better and worse. I was in France, and then Malaysia, and then Pakistan, and then back to Europe. I was not on the ground for the wildfires, but I was on the ground for the heat waves that were the first domino that led to them.
Basically, in the last week, where had I been? I'd been in Rome in my home, but collaborating with The Times colleagues in France and Spain, and trying to wrap our arms around the on-the-ground stuff, and then more from my perspective, like the science and the climate change aspect of that story.