“Mind-Bogglingly Crazy”: Climate Experts Alarmed by Europe’s Deadly Spring Heatwaves |
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Malcolm Mistry knew it was going to get “very warm, very quickly” on Monday morning but a slow start out of bed delayed his plans for an early game of cricket with his son. It was already 10 a.m. by the time the pair arrived at the sun-soaked nets of their local club in south-west London, and to the embarrassment of the 48-year-old scientist, who played cricket in his youth, his body was struggling after just half an hour of bowling.
Had he continued for another hour, Mistry reckons he would have probably suffered from heatstroke. Had he and his son stayed until noon, they would have found themselves straining their bodies in direct sunlight while a nearby weather station logged the UK’s hottest May temperature since records began.
“I could feel I was panting a bit more heavily,” said Mistry, a leading climate and health researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “That’s when I said to myself: ‘I need to stop here right now, immediately, before something happens.’”
“For vulnerable groups without access to cooling…these temperatures are quite simply dangerous and potentially fatal.”
The dark side of a gloriously hot European summer, excess mortality data compiled by experts such as Mistry shows, is an almost unfathomably large death toll—one that society rarely treats as a crisis. In 2024, summer heat in the EU claimed roughly three times more lives than car crashes,........