‘A sad inevitability’: after decades of climate warnings, why is Europe so unprepared for rising heat?

O n Wednesday, Pierre Masselot received a text from his daughter’s nursery – less than 50 miles from the weather station that was the first this week to break the UK June temperature record – asking parents to collect children early because the school buildings were about to get worryingly hot. Similar scenes were repeated across Europe this week as the continent swelters through its most severe and widespread heatwave on record – an oppressive force made hotter by carbon pollution and less bearable by repeated failures to prepare for it. France experienced its hottest day and night on record, while the UK and Switzerland both broke their heat records for a June day. For Masselot, an environmental epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who has become one of Europe’s leading detectives tallying the hidden death toll from heatwaves, the past few days are reminiscent of the terrible summer heat that swept Europe in 2003. While he was too young then to fear for his health, he was old enough to grasp the horrors it held. Then, the teenager from southern France was bouncing basketballs in the sun at summer camp as brutal August heat turned towns and cities across Europe into ovens. Hot days stressed bodies and warm nights ruined rest. Older people, particularly women and those who lived alone, made up the bulk of the 70,000 victims who died from that summer’s extreme heat. …