France records hottest night and day as Europe heatwave spreads | DW News

Much of Europe is sweltering in a heat wave that has seen temperatures soar above 40 degrees Celsius. From the UK to France, Germany and Spain, scorching hot days have been followed by nearly as hot nights. France has recorded its hottest day ever and dozens of dozens have died from drowning in the country as people sought relief from the extreme temperatures and the Seville at night. Even at this time, temperatures hardly budge. Here in Spain, people are used to the extreme heat. But this year, it's different. And for many, there's only one way to cope. And also outside, where people try to cool down from the heat of today, they're struggling with the scorching temperatures. You expect it to be hot during the day. You can just about manage with a siesta. But at night, when you think you'll finally get some rest, it just doesn't happen. I live on the sixth floor. The sun beats down on it. It heats up the whole flat and it's really hard to get to sleep without a fan or AC. Similar scenes in Paris. People are flocking to the canals for a cooling dip. Or they escape their stifling apartments by going to a park. Yeah, it's really hot. That's why I absolutely prefer to be outside in the evening. The temperature just doesn't go down at home. France just experienced its hottest night since record-keeping began 80 years ago. Like in many parts of Central Europe, most French homes do not have air conditioning. The situation is particularly dangerous for vulnerable groups like small children and the elderly. The government held a crisis meeting to discuss its response, after more than 40 deaths so far, including two children who were left in a car in the south. The heat wave is caused by hot air that's trapped over the Iberian Peninsula, France and southern England. Experts say human-induced climate change is partly to blame for the extreme heat. In many parts of the world, average temperatures have already risen by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. UN Secretary-General António Guterres once again called for stronger actions to slash greenhouse gas emissions. This time he rounded on the tech industry. And I'm calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems, carbon, water and land footprints, and commit to power every data center with renewable energy by 2030. No more hidden costs, no more shifting the burden onto those least able to bear it. It's time to come clean. Europe is bracing for many more days of extreme heat, with more records expected to tumble across the continent, and most likely for a brutally hot summer ahead. We can now speak about this with Eric Fischer. He's a professor at ETH Zurich. That's the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he's investigating weather and climate extremes. Thanks for being with us, Professor. Europe is currently experiencing extreme heat, with France hit particularly hard. Why is this happening now? Well, we're currently going through an unusual weather situation, with a strong high-pressure system situated over Western Europe, and that is slowly, slowly transitioning into Central Europe. And in a high-pressure system, we have high insulation, so low clouds, and then also subsiding air, which leads to these very extreme temperatures. Well, the temperatures have been rising in Europe for years. There have been multiple heat waves. Is this solely down to the greenhouse effect, or are there other important factors at work here? So this is specifically a weather event, but these weather events have become, these heat waves have become more frequent. We have seen events in 2015, 2018, 2019, 2022, and many of them, the recent ones, actually have not been more of the same, but breaking previous records. So going back into, for more than 170 years of measurements, the temperature we're currently observing in many places actually have never been observed in this intensity. And yes, this is a clear signal of climate change. How do you see things developing in the years ahead, Professor? How quickly do you expect temperatures to rise, and which countries are better off in terms of climate? So you know, Western Europe is actually the third region in the world that has been seeing the strongest increase in summer temperature over recent decades. So we're really currently in a hotspot region. Obviously, the absolute temperatures are still higher in tropical regions and desert regions, but we have been one of the places on Earth where we have seen the strongest trends. And you could easily see that we are only just slightly past mid-June, and we've already been hit by the second record-breaking heat wave this season. And this whole sequence of heat waves causes a lot of challenges for ecosystems, for we will also see river lake temperatures to go up. This is part of a trend that we expect to continue into the future. Europe has to get ready for this kind of heat that's coming. You've been describing how it's been getting increasingly hot. Do you think Europe is doing what it needs to be doing in order to prepare people for this kind of heat? So, so far, we're definitely not prepared, right? Our cities have been built decades or even centuries in the past, and they're really not, they've been built for temperatures that are quite, were quite different to what we're currently experiencing. I think the recent heat waves, 2015, 18, and 2022, for it was 40 degrees in the UK, have been eye-openers. So, but it's now a process basically to get our buildings ready, to get our offices ready, to get our public transport and cities at large ready, because the cities are really hot spots. They don't cool off as much during night. So the temperatures stay very high at night, and we have very little air conditioning installed across many European cities. So I think this is going to be a long process to actually build our cities ready for the heat. Currently, we're not there yet, but what I see is a lot of movement going on, that, for instance, making cities greener, planting trees, increasing the evaporation from the ground. That is definitely going into the right direction. Eric Fisher, climate scientist at ETH Zurich. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. Thank you, a pleasure. Dr. Samantha Burgess is strategic lead for climate at the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. Welcome to DW. Can we start with what's causing this current heat wave and then zoom out to the wider climate picture? What's going on now? Yeah, so the main drivers of the current heat wave are the burning of fossil fuels and the accumulation of fossil fuels in the atmosphere. But beyond that, there's also hot air that's come up from Africa. This has been trapped in what's known as a heat dome. So we've got a large, stable high-pressure system that is sending hot air back down to the Earth's surface that's continuing to heat up. And this is a very stable system that's expected to last several more days. And is this this omega block that we keep hearing about? Yeah, that's right. So the omega block is effectively the jet stream, and the jet stream changes in its amplitude. So how wobbly it is or not. And at this point in time, it's quite wobbly. So we've got this omega symbol, there's like a giant N with a high-pressure system in the middle and two low-pressure systems on either side. So one at the Atlantic, one in Central Europe. And this is a very stable environment that's kind of gotten stuck like a traffic jam. And we saw in our report, people in Spain deciding to try and fight this weather trend with better and more air conditioning. Is that approach sustainable? No, not at all. So it's really like putting a band-aid on rather than finding the cause of the illness. So we really need to adapt our cities. And by adapting our cities, I mean reduce the mean temperature. And we know we can do this by greening our cities. So we have lots of parks and trees. It can be 5 to 10 degrees cooler than places surrounded by concrete and glass. So that's really important. And then having public buildings that are cooled so they can act as refuges for the community. And is this pattern now set and inevitable, year after year of record-breaking temperatures? Until what? Well, until we turn the tap off to emissions for burning fossil fuels. So we know the atmosphere is currently about 1.4 degrees warmer than it was in the pre-industrial time. And with that 1.4 degrees of warming, the extremes get worse. And we are really seeing that in heatwaves over the summer period. So heatwaves are coming earlier. So we've had exceptional heatwaves already in May and now in June. These heatwaves are coming earlier. They're more intense and they last longer. And we will continue to see this type of signal, the warmer our climate gets. Tell us about why Europe seems to be being particularly hit. Temperatures elsewhere have been hotter, but Europe appears to be the continent that is heating fastest. Why? Yeah, that's right. So Europe is warming at about twice the global average rate. And it's really for three main reasons. So one is circulation changes. So those circulation changes are really driving these heatwaves that we're seeing at the moment. And that is part of how the jet stream behaves, particularly over the European continent. The other two reasons are changing reflectivity. So we've lost a lot of our snow and ice covered areas, particularly in the winter season. And we've lost some of that low level cloud cover through improving air quality. So that means we're getting more of the sun's energy heating up our planet. And then the third reason is proximity to the Arctic and geography in general. We'll talk about unforeseen consequences. We're getting hit like this because we have improved air quality. That sounds just someone's having a laugh. Is this same climate phenomenon that is causing this hot weather also causing the massive flooding we've seen in Europe, in Ukraine last year, Spain and Germany a couple of years ago, Hungary and Austria? Is that all part of the same thing? Yes. So just to clarify, the improvements in air quality save millions of lives every year. So it's a really important measure. But because of that improved air quality, we have less of those aerosols that seed low level clouds in our atmosphere. So it's really not choosing improving life quality and increased solar radiation, but it is an unintended consequence of reducing these aerosols that produce low level clouds. In terms of the extremes that we're seeing, yes, the answer is climate change is the cause of the extreme heat waves we're seeing. And climate change in a warmer atmosphere also holds more moisture. So that means when we have these severe rainfall events, the rain is falling more intensely. So we're getting more rain, which is leading to the catastrophic flooding that we've seen across Europe over the last few years. We also heard the UN Secretary General challenging the tech industry about its environmental impact. Is it fair to single them out like that? I think the reality is that every single business and policy making body has to do its part. And we have the technological solutions. Europe's doing a great job in electrification of our energy sector. So we can see that in terms of energy production for electricity, Europe has used more renewable energy for that electricity generation over the last three years than fossil fuels. So that's great news, but we need to go a lot further. And the tech sector can really look at these, you know, modifications to help us mitigate climate change, but also adapt to our climate change world, because we're all living in a climate change reality right now. Thanks for joining us and talking us through that so clearly. Dr. Samantha Burgess from the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. Thank you so much.