By now, it’s a familiar headline: A record-breaking heat wave sweeps across Europe, leaving thousands dead in its wake. It happened in 2003, 2006, 2019 and 2023 — and scientists say it will keep happening on the fastest-warming continent on Earth.
New research highlights the dangers in store. A study, published last Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, finds that history’s most notorious European heat waves would be hotter and deadlier if they happened in a warmer future climate.
The study comes as global temperatures risk breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — the most ambitious target of the Paris Agreement. This month’s U.N. climate summit ended in a deal that deferred some of the hardest decisions, as a recent U.N. report estimated that current climate policies would likely result in about 2.8 C of warming by the end of the century.
The Nature Climate Change study digs into the growing dangers.
