Scorching Europe struggles to adapt to near-record temperatures

As temperatures reached near record highs across the Mediterranean, the European weather forecasting agency warned that the continent should brace for more intense and longer lasting heatwaves.

“We do expect heatwaves, such as the ones that affected Europe last summer or the one currently ongoing, to become more intense and to last longer because of climate change,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. He added that it was unclear yet whether a previous record temperature of 48.8 degrees set in Sicily two years ago had been broken this week.

Temperatures are set to ease slightly towards the end of this week but will remain “much warmer than normal” in many parts of southern Europe, Mr Buontempo said.

On Monday and Tuesday temperatures hit the high 40s in Sardinia and Sicily and were only slightly lower in cities such as Madrid and Rome, causing authorities to close tourist attractions and issue alerts.

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The punishing heat in the continent is a result of an anticyclonic high pressure system, named Cerberus by the Italian Meteorological Society after the mythical monster that guarded the gates of hell. It follows the hottest June on record globally and the hottest first week in July. According to Copernicus, temperatures in June were 0.5 degree above the global average.

The weather has had drastic consequences for tourism, agriculture and industry. Multiple wildfires outside Athens, which started on Monday, were still burning on Tuesday, destroying homes and cars and forcing thousands of residents and children from summer camps to evacuate the area. High winds together with high temperatures set greater Athens on the highest level of alert for wildfires.

Last weekend one of the most popular sites in Athens, the Acropolis, which receives more than 15,000 visitors daily, had to be shut down during the peak heat hours.

Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni said she had been receiving hourly updates about the heat to decide whether to keep sites open. “We all need to adapt ourselves in the climate crisis we are facing,” she said.

In Italy, health officials declared heat emergencies in 20 cities on Tuesday, which will rise to 23 on Wednesday, while hospitals have been warned to brace for a potential surge of people suffering from heat-related problems requiring urgent attention. In Rome, where tourists struggled to find cool or shady resting spots, the city’s protection organisation and volunteers set up 28 help points across the city to provide water, and medical assistance, to those overcome by the heat.

[ European heatwave in five graphics ]

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A study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health on Monday estimated that more than 61,000 people died from heat-related conditions in Europe between the end of May and beginning of September last year, with Italy the worst hit by heat. Spain and Germany were also among those with the highest numbers of mortalities from heat-related issues.

Italy’s influential farming lobby, Coldiretti, said dairy farmers had resorted to using fans and sprinkler systems to cool their livestock, as they warned of a 10 per cent drop in milk production because of animals’ heat stress.

It said farmers would suffer not just from a reduction in milk production, but higher water and energy costs as they ran the cooling systems “to help the animals resist the siege of the heat”.

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Luca Bergamaschi, founder of Ecco, an independent climate think-tank, said the extreme heat – just two months after Italy’s northern agricultural heartland was devastated by massive floods – should be a wake-up call to Italy’s rightwing government, which has balked at parts of the EU’s ambitious green deal to tackle global warming.

Although Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, says members of her rightwing government are not “dangerous climate change deniers”, her government has said any measures to combat climate change should be gradual so as not to affect Italy’s economy and traditions.

Heatwaves are becoming more common in all parts of the world, but Europe is warming faster than the global average because of its high percentage of land mass and its position on the Earth’s surface.

The record temperatures are the result of climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels and other human activities, combined with the emerging El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern in the Pacific that prompts warmer temperatures globally, according to Dr Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a US non-profit climate research organisation, who predicted that records may be broken again over the coming weeks. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023