We are paying the price for years of climate crisis; a single climatic event is not enough to explain the incredible heat of these weeks.
Red alerts, swimming in the Seine, sunscreen. “Keep the sun out of the rooms” with curtains and artificial trees. Frequent showers, air conditioning, fans, sweat, and deaths. Heatwaves – but more than waves, it’s a low-temperature cooking that is baking all of Europe – are our life now.
On Monday, France declared a red alert in more than half of its 96 departments. In the southeast of the country, two children aged four and two were found dead in their family car: the intense heat is “the main hypothesis being investigated.” Three elderly people had already died near Bordeaux over the weekend. The British Met Office issued a red alert for extreme heat in southern England and Wales, where temperatures are expected to reach up to 39 degrees and “very warm” nights. In Germany, the risk of wildfires is increasing in the south and east, with Bonn, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt preparing to face temperatures close to 40 degrees next weekend. Europe is warming at more than double the global average, with about 2.5 degrees more than pre-industrial levels. Some parts of the continent extend into the Arctic, the region warming fastest on Earth, where temperatures are rising at a rate three to four times higher than the global average. But all this should not be considered an anomaly, rather a trend.
Many media are attributing this heatwave to El Niño, whose arrival was officially announced by NOAA in early June. It’s a convenient and “meteorologically incorrect” explanation, says Ioanna Vergini, founder of the global forecasting platform WYF24 at Euronews. “The Pacific is not currently in a strong El Niño phase, and even when it is, its direct influence on European summer heat is weak and poorly defined. It’s a classic blocking phenomenon of the jet stream acting against a backdrop of record heat. The dome is the mechanism, long-term warming is the amplifier, El Niño is just a diversion”. El Niño raises global average temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Celsius, which is still significant, but not comparable to the human-caused climate change – because it should be noted that El Niño is a natural phenomenon that occurs every year – which has already raised global surface temperature by 1.3-1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels.
Another problem is the lack of clouds. Although emission control measures have helped Europe significantly reduce air pollution in recent decades, they have also reduced the low clouds produced by aerosols, which acted as a cooling barrier. The paradox is: less pollution, less screen between the sun and the Earth’s surface, less water evaporating, and fewer low clouds. It’s one of the many vicious circles of the climate crisis: as snow and ice melt, the darker surfaces that are exposed absorb more heat, accelerating the melting of more snow and ice. As pollution decreases, one of its inadvertently useful consequences also diminishes.
This is demonstrated by research from World Weather Attribution, which analyzed climate data from 854 cities in 30 European countries.
