"It feels like summer": Europeans hit the beaches amid record winter temperatures

Record-high winter temperatures swept across parts of Europe over the new year, bringing calls from activists for faster action against climate change while offering short-term respite to governments struggling with high gas prices.

Hundreds of sites have seen temperature records smashed in the past days, from Switzerland to Poland to Hungary, which registered its warmest Christmas Eve in Budapest and saw temperatures climb to 18.9 degrees Celsius on Jan 1.

In Spain, sunbathers hit the beaches of Malaga and streets of Bilbao on Wednesday as an unseasonably warm winter brought temperatures as high as 20C.

“It’s not normal for Bilbao to have such good weather. It always rains a lot here, it’s very cold and it’s January and it feels like summer, you know?” said 81-year-old local resident Eusebio Folgueira.

"Now we expect extreme weather from time to time, but I think there is a link with climate change here because climate change is making these extremes more frequent and making heat waves more intense. And it's really striking what we're seeing across Europe at the moment and it's showing us the vulnerability we have, even in relatively wealthy parts of the world," climate scientist Professor Peter Stott from the University of Exeter warned.

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