BRUSSELS — Climate change supercharged last week’s European heat wave and tripled the death toll, a group of scientists said Wednesday.
Extreme temperatures baked large swaths of the continent in late June and early July, exposing millions of Europeans to dangerous levels of heat.
Looking at 12 European cities, the researchers found that in 11 of them, heat waves of the type that peaked last week would have been significantly less intense — between 2 to 4 degrees Celsius cooler — in a world without human-made global warming.
This climate-induced change in temperatures, the scientists said, led to a surge in excess deaths in those cities. Of the 2,300 additional fatalities linked to high temperatures, around 1,500 of them can be attributed to global warming, they estimated.
