As the severe impacts of climate change become increasingly apparent, concerns about climate-related issues have grown in recent years. The news media plays an important role in disseminating information about climate change and its consequences to the wider public and thus can influence public climate concern. Here, we investigate how extreme weather affects issue attention to climate change in the European online news media and how extreme weather and news coverage jointly shape changes in climate change concern. For the analysis, we combine 12 harmonized Eurobarometer survey waves, measuring public concerns about climate issues, with meteorological data and indices of environmental news coverage based on publications from 2 481 media outlets in 200 regions of 22 European countries. Using fixed effects panel models, we estimate effects of temperature anomalies on climate news and climate concern and explore the role of the news media in explaining changes in concerns in response to temperature anomalies. The results indicate that unusually high temperatures exhibit a robust positive effect on media attention, especially when they overlap with other events that draw attention to the climate topic, such as major climate change conferences. We furthermore find evidence that the climate news in national outlets increases public concern about climate change and show that reporting by such outlets is likely to partly explain the effects of temperature anomalies on concerns. We do not find any significant effects of climate reporting in regional news outlets on climate concern. Our results suggest that the national news media partly mediates the effects of extreme weather on public climate change concern. The findings also highlight that focusing events strongly influence issue attention of the media, providing windows of opportunity to raise awareness about climate issues, while pointing to challenges in sustaining attention to related topics beyond short-lived news cycles.