Last week’s heatwave pushed more than 150 million Europeans into temperatures above 35C, with several parts of the continent soaring past 40C, while scientists are expected to calculate a death toll that will probably number in the thousands. That’s the hard edge of Europe’s climate order: people cooked alive, while the institutions that keep fossil fuels moving talk about adaptation as if it were a seminar topic.
Spain, one of the few countries that produces real-time statistics on excess deaths linked to heat, has recorded more than 100 per day since Wednesday. French authorities said at least 1,000 additional deaths had been recorded between 24 and 27 June, a figure they said was likely to rise. Those deaths included four toddlers who died in incidents linked to the heat, including a three-year-old boy in a Paris suburb who was found dead last week after climbing into a car and becoming trapped. The state counts the dead after the fact. It does not stop the conditions that kill them.
The Cost of Delay
The Guardian’s Monday briefing said a heatwave of this magnitude has never been recorded this early in the year. It also said countries have not done enough to cut emissions from fossil fuels that are causing extreme weather, or to adapt to the realities of managing the toll on transport and healthcare systems. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the planet. That’s not a surprise failure. It’s the bill coming due for a system built around extraction, movement of goods, and political denial.
In the UK, hundreds of schools closed early, workplaces overheated and train operators asked people not to travel. On Wednesday, the London ambulance service recorded its busiest ever day for the most serious category of callouts, with 642 responses to reports of cardiac arrests, patients who have stopped breathing and life-threatening injuries. Two days later, the record was broken again, with more 999 calls made than ever before, more even than during the Covid-19 pandemic. By yesterday, the heatwave had moved east, and Poland, Czechia and Slovakia were all expecting record temperatures of more than 40C. Bautzen in eastern Saxony broke the German record for the highest overnight minimum temperature of 29.4C.
Culture War on a Burning Continent
The briefing said climate scientists once assumed extreme weather in richer countries would galvanize investment in renewable energy, support for green political parties and the phasing out of fossil fuels, but that logic has not played out in reality. Instead, the climate is now at the frontier of the culture wars, shaped by arguments about air conditioning or phone-ins about whether people are being wimps for complaining about the high temperatures. The spectacle is familiar. People suffer. Commentators argue about manners.
Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent, said climate-driven weather events can sometimes cut through, pointing to the 2021 floods in the Ahr valley in Germany, which killed 188 people and washed away entire villages. But he said the opposite increasingly happens. "One trend that’s possibly the most counterintuitive about these kinds of moments is that far-right parties who are denying the science of climate change can get a bit of a boost from extreme weather events," he said. "They spin the extreme weather as a failure of government policy, arguing that focusing on climate change was part of the initial problem, and it is more about mismanagement."
Niranjan said that in many cases, such as the 2024 floods in Valencia, when more than 230 people were killed after a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours to parts of eastern Spain, both things are true: the climate drove the extreme weather, but poor governance contributed to the deadly outcome. He said this is likely to become an increasingly common dynamic as extreme weather events grow in frequency. "Both sides of this issue need to be addressed," he said. "There is this weird tendency where political parties completely deny one of the causes by either focusing just on climate or just on adaptation, without having a good plan for the other. This is certainly a part of the strategy used by far-right parties to bash climate policy."
Who Gets Protected, Who Gets Left
The briefing said social media played a major role in shaping perceptions of last week’s heatwave and driving divisions about what should be done to protect people from future extreme weather events. In Paris, balconies and rooftops became so hot that people were frying eggs and steak in the sun. One man went viral for making a heatwave crepe. Much of the online debate centered on whether Europe needed a larger rollout of air conditioning to protect its population from the heat.
In a post seen by nearly 20 million people, Patrick Collison, CEO of US tech firm Stripe, asked the AI model Claude to settle the air-con debate for Europeans. It concluded that the continent needed to throw its weight behind air conditioning and move past "the psychological discomfort" of "admitting that the American approach to summer was correct all along". In France, the center of last week’s heatwave, many green progressives continued to argue against air conditioning for ideological reasons, despite the extreme heat. The far-right National Rally in France announced a "major" plan for AC.
Niranjan said there is a significant gap between online discourse and reality when it comes to air conditioning. "Within Europe, air conditioning is nowhere near as big of a fight as some of the international press have made it out to be," he said. "There are very few actual restrictions on putting in air conditioning units in your home. This meme in the US that we hate air-con and refuse to have it is not really true. It is less common than in rich parts of Asia and North America but, until recently, people did not need it."
He said that even if there was a major success in cutting fossil fuel emissions, extreme weather events of increasing severity are guaranteed in coming years. While much of the world’s trajectory on global heating will be shaped by government policy in China, the US and India, he said mitigating the impact of extreme heat is something everyone can get involved in. "For people who have this feeling of futility about climate change, there is still a lot we can do," he said. "There are obvious things like drinking water, wearing loose-fitting clothing, staying in the shade and avoiding the hotter parts of the day. But we also need to look out for vulnerable people. Older people especially cannot regulate their body temperature as well."
The World Health Organization said earlier this month that nearly 200,000 people had died in Europe due to heat in the past four years, and the majority of those deaths would have been preventable if obvious adaptation measures had been taken. Niranjan said charities advise people to check on elderly neighbors, particularly those who live alone. "The small things really matter," he said. "Pop over with a glass of icy water or an ice-cream. None of this will make a difference to the big picture on the climate crisis, but it is ridiculously hot, and people are dying without many of us realising."