LONDON — Humanity’s burning of fossil fuels directly led to the deaths of at least 1,500 people in a European heat wave last week, a study published Wednesday said.
While temperatures soared across the United States, Europe was also subjected to its own “heat dome” in late June and early July. England and Spain recorded their hottest June on record, schools closed across France and wildfires raged in Sardinia.
Around 2,300 people died across 12 European cities, including London, Paris, Barcelona and Rome, according to the study by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Of these, around two-thirds — or 1,500 deaths — can be attributed to global warming, 88% of whom were over age 65, the study said.
The scientists took the estimated deaths for last week’s heat wave and compared them with the expected deaths in a computer-simulated heat wave based on a world without human-made global warming. While it is not a peer-reviewed study, it uses peer-reviewed methods to reach its conclusions.
“Heat waves don’t leave a trail of destruction like wildfires or storms,” Gary Konstantinoudis, a biostatistician at Imperial College and co-author of the study, said in a video message accompanying the research. “This is why heat waves are known as silent killers: Most heat wave deaths happen in homes and hospitals, out of public view and are rarely reported.”
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He said the casualties reviewed in this study were likely an underestimate and “only a snapshot of climate change driven temperatures” throughout Europe.
The new study is the first “real-time” analysis of its kind, it says. It goes further than the usual assessments of the meteorological impacts of heat waves — and instead looks at the harder-to-measure toll on human life.
Climate change supercharged the heat wave, which lasted from June 23 to July 2, by between 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 Fahrenheit), the study said.
Heat wave temperatures "will keep rising and future death tolls are likely to be higher,” it warned, “until the world largely stops burning oil, gas and coal and reaches net zero emissions.”
Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at England’s University of Reading, described the methods used in the study as “robust techniques” that “leave no doubt that climate change is already a deadly force in Europe.”
“Think of the Earth like an oven,” Deoras said in a statement. “In the past, heatwaves were like turning the oven up for a short burst. But with climate change, it is as if we have permanently set the oven to a higher temperature. It takes much less to reach dangerous levels of heat that can be fatal.”
In a statement, Richard Allan, a professor of climate science also at the University of Reading, hailed the “forensic analysis combining observations, simulations and health data.”
Even without this data, however, “it is blindingly obvious from the multiple lines of evidence that, when weather conditions" generate heat waves, "they are more intense, meaning that moderate heat becomes dangerous and record heat becomes unprecedented,” he said.
Much of Europe's infrastructure was not created to accommodate higher temperatures. Thick-walled buildings and a lack of air conditioning, which historically has not been necessary, make sweltering conditions more unbearable.
