And it was the third toastiest summer on record for the entire continent, which is warming faster than any other. Now, scientists have calculated a death toll from the season’s sweltering temperatures: more than 50,000 people across the continent’s cities. The estimate, which has not yet been peer-reviewed but is slated to be published in the journal Nature Health, marks a new record for heat-related deaths in Europe, nearly doubling the toll of the last two deadliest summers in 2022 and 2003.
About two-thirds of the deaths are directly attributable to climate change, mainly driven by the burning of fossil fuels. During the spring and summer, Europe faced an assault of back-to-back heat waves. The hot, dry conditions also contributed to intense wildfires that threatened lives across the region.
However, much of the infrastructure in Western and Northern Europe wasn’t designed to cope with the sweltering temperatures brought on by human-caused global warming, Barnes explains to Seth Borenstein at the . To estimate heat deaths, governments will usually look through death records to identify excess mortalities that may be attributed to higher temperatures, Warren Cornwall reports for Science. In this study, however, Barnes and her colleagues took a different approach.
They used published peer-reviewed research to build computer simulations of how many people would have died between June and August both with and without the effects of climate change. They specifically looked at deaths in 854 urban areas across 30 countries. Analyses revealed that 50,391 deaths in those cities could be attributed to higher temperatures.
Nearly one-third of the deaths occurred between June 17 and July 1, when a heat wave brought temperatures 9.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the average temperature in 1991 to 2020. The summer was especially deadly for people ages 85 and up, who represent about 22,500—nearly 45 percent—of the mortalities. But young people were also affected, with people between 20 and 44 representing more than 800 of the deaths.
The researchers didn’t even include deaths related to excessive springtime heat, which they estimate killed about 1,500 people between May 21 and 31. The numbers are likely an underestimate, says Kristie Ebi, a climate epidemiologist at the University of Washington who wasn’t involved in the study, to Science. Computer models often assume that deaths rise at a steady rate with growing temperatures, but it’s possible that fatalities actually shoot up during the most extreme heat.
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