In retrospect, it’s probably fortunate that the ongoing 2026 FIFA World Cup ended up being hosted largely in the United States this summer, rather than somewhere in Europe.
Why? Because if it had been in France or Spain, both the soccer players on the field and especially the fans in the stands would likely be sweltering their way through brutal, genuinely dangerous heat conditions, with no way to escape them.
Europe remains gripped by one of the most powerful heat waves it has ever seen, an intractable heat dome sitting over most of the continent that refuses to budge, while northern Europe in particular records new all-time record temperatures on a daily basis. With far less air conditioning coverage than the United States, thanks to less historical need for it and practical challenges in now instituting it, Europe has been grappling with the deadly cost of confronting temperatures that strain what unadapted human bodies can endure...To Read The Full Content; Tap Here Now .
And a new study makes clear what we all should probably have been able to infer: These conditions could likely never have gotten so bad without the aid of climate change.
The study, published today by the scientific network World Weather Attribution, concluded that it would have been “virtually impossible” for a similar heat wave to reach such heights just a few decades ago, and that human-derived warming of the planet is “unequivocally to blame” for taking what years ago would have been a somewhat milder heat wave and instead turning it into a record-breaking one.
The dome of hot air has pushed both temperatures and humidity to record levels across huge swaths of the continent, leading to desperate efforts to cool off from residents who don’t have easy access to climate-controlled spaces. The scale of the records falling has been prodigious: In just this last week, France recorded its hottest single day ever on average, and summer has barely even begun in earnest. The UK, Spain and Switzerland all posted their hottest June days ever recorded, both in terms of daytime and nighttime temperatures. There genuinely is no reprieve from the all-encompassing heat. And no, these aren’t temperature readings being faked by people gaming the system to win Polymarket bets.
The study, meanwhile, analyzed historic temperature ranges to compare the hottest periods across this current heat wave with previous major heat waves that gripped Europe in 1976 and 2003, the latter of which was estimated to have killed in excess of 70,000 people. Researchers found that the nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit that the world as a whole has warmed since 1976 had a compounding effect on how high temperatures could now reach during a similar heat wave, making the overall effect far worse. They calculated, for instance, that if this same heat wave was occurring across Europe in June of 1976, it would result in average daytime and nighttime temperatures that are 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler (3.5 degrees Celsius) than what is now being experienced.
That may not seem like a lot in abstract, but that kind of temperature variation, or reprieve from even hotter temperatures, can mean the difference between life and death when you’re talking about the human body and heat exhaustion or heat stroke. As the researchers concluded, “This summer shows that at 1.4 degrees Celsius of global warming, extreme heat is already reaching the limits of our societies’ ability to cope.”
There’s no doubt that the current heat wave is already having intense, deadly effects, although it will be impossible to judge the full scale of the toll it takes until well in the future. Individual countries, however, are already reporting grim tallies. Spain, for instance, reported that more than 200 people have died from extreme heat over the course of just four days.
And in France, at least 55 people have reportedly drowned within the last week while attempting to seek relief from the heat, literally marching their exhausted bodies into the water despite not being able to keep themselves afloat. Many are apparently children or teenagers, attempting to beat the heat, swimming in unsupervised areas.
In America, a country inextricably built on air conditioning, it can be difficult for the average person to properly empathize or picture the experience that this kind of heat genuinely represents.
We live in a climate-controlled bubble of false invincibility, and all it takes is the brief puncturing of that bubble–such as a car AC breaking–to suddenly thrust us into a deadly tragedy. It’s natural for an American reading about Europe’s heat wave to wonder, for instance, why the effects of climate change haven’t already led to more widespread adoption of air conditioning in countries such as France, Spain or the UK.
But there are real, complex reasons for why Europe remains particularly vulnerable to such heat. Beyond the historical lack of need for air conditioning, which made residents of these countries slower to respond to the changing climate conditions, AC is frequently more expensive and more difficult to install in the older-on-average homes and buildings common to Europe, and the cost of energy to power those devices is often higher than it would be in the United States.
Some countries have likewise made it difficult to transition to widespread AC adoption because of the climate crisis, because those countries have set ambitious goals for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, which would jump if millions more AC units suddenly came online.
Ironically, if Europe suddenly adopted air conditioning en masse at this point, the physical result would likely be to push outdoor temperatures even higher. It’s a vicious cycle waiting to happen, but you can’t expect people to simply accept intolerable conditions, either. The adoption of AC in Europe has ticked upward significantly in recent years as a result, but that still leaves many millions of people with no access to a climate-controlled interior. These are obviously the people most at risk.
Nowhere on Earth is experiencing warming faster than Europe currently is, and the deadly “outlier” of a heat wave currently in process could before long become the brutal norm. As Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London put it: “It’s really now a question of what kind of future we want for ourselves, and whether we’re willing to do what it takes to secure it.”