Did Cleaning Up Europe’s Air Make It Hotter?

Europe has been warming significantly faster than the global average, and this summer’s heatwaves once again prompted politicians and environmental activists to point to fossil-fuel emissions as the obvious culprit. In this episode, Dr. David Legates examines a new study that suggests there is another important piece of the story: Europe’s remarkable success in reducing air pollution.

Since 1980, Europe has dramatically reduced sulfur dioxide and other aerosol emissions. Those pollutants brought serious health and environmental costs, but some of them also reflected sunlight and increased cloud reflectivity, producing a cooling effect. As Europe cleaned up its air, that cooling influence diminished. The new research suggests that the resulting changes may have contributed not only directly to regional warming, but also indirectly by altering atmospheric circulation patterns that favor persistent summer heat and heatwaves.

So, could one of the reasons Europe has warmed so rapidly be that Europeans successfully eliminated some of the pollution that had been keeping temperatures down?

In this episode, Dr. Legates examines the new study, the science of aerosols, Europe’s dramatic decline in sulfur emissions, the difference between weather and climate, and what this complicated story means for the way we talk about climate change. We also consider a question that environmental policy rarely acknowledges: what happens when solving one environmental problem changes another part of the climate system in an unexpected way?

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2026GL122424

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/european-heat-wave-driven-by-cleaner-air-u-k-climate-office-study-finds/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/22/heatwaves-caused-by-fall-in-pollution/

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