I’ve been watching the weather in Europe carefully since I am headed there later this week with a church group. Today’s high temperature in Prague was supposed to reach 99 F, an astoundingly high value for central Europe. Many buildings there have no air conditioning, which brings extra misery and danger to the residents.
This European heat wave stretched from Spain and Portugal all the way across to central Europe. London set its all-time highest July record this week. Here’s a story from Weather Underground on all the records that have been broken.
Yahoo News reported that in the past, a heat wave like this would have been a 1 in 30 year event, but that more recently it is now much more frequent, coming at 3-4 year intervals. A team of international scientists and universities believe that the increase in frequency of these deadly events is due to rising temperatures across the region. Here is a link to the story.
While attribution of individual weather events like a heat wave is difficult to pin on climate change, the trends in heat waves in Europe have been noticeable. Cities have been forced to increase their messages for preventing heat-related deaths and to provide more places for vulnerable citizens to cool off. Even hotter conditions are forecast to return at the end of July, which could mean a spike in heat-related deaths there if the forecast verifies.
