Millions of people across Europe were exposed to extreme and exceptional high temperatures on Tuesday, with 40 fatalities from drowning recorded in France in the past week as residents seek relief from the searing heat.
Temperatures will remain high around the clock in France, the European nation the most affected so far by the early summer heat wave. The national weather service, Meteo France, placed 54 departments, about half the country, under a red heat wave alert.
Italy, Spain, and Britain were also hit.
Human-caused climate change is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and U.N. climate agency projections say the next five years should shatter more heat records.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that the 40 people who died by drowning since last Thursday were mainly young people.
The heat wave is exceptionally intense, coming very early in the summer, “but with a still uncertain duration,” the weather service said. It has already been compared to the August 2003 heat wave, when the highest temperatures in over half a century caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them among older people in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organization’s Europe office said this month. (AP News)