A heatwave continues to grip large parts of Europe, with authorities in many countries issuing health warnings amid searing temperatures.
Southern Spain is the worst-affected region, with temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius recorded in Seville and neighbouring areas.
A new heat record for June of 46C was set on Saturday in the town of El Granado, according to Spain’s national weather service, which also said this month is on track to be the hottest June on record.
From a scientific point of view this is correct, the climate system is too complex to say this particular event is due to climate change. Exceptional events happened in the past too. So you can only draw conclusions from larger statistics. What’s solid science is the increasing averages, increasing frequencies of extreme events etc. If it was scientifically informed, that’s what this kind of sentence mean.
It started out hotter than it would be and the heatwave is at least a few degrees more severe than it would be otherwise.
Scientists do actually make attempts to investigate the contribution of the trends to specific events, it’s called extreme event attribution, but it is a very young field and the error bars on everything are still huge. That said,
But the quote from the article was strictly correct in saying “it’s hard”.