{"id":852,"date":"2026-06-25T12:41:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=852"},"modified":"2026-06-25T12:41:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:41:40","slug":"europe-cannot-cope-with-this-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=852","title":{"rendered":"Europe Cannot Cope With This Heat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A summer escape to Paris, at least in the American mind, evokes a certain set of images: quiet strolls along the canals, long hours in bookstores and museums, a pleasant park bench, a glass of wine. Those pleasures are now contending with one of the most brutal and dangerous heat waves that Europe has faced in decades, a muggy, enervating stretch of weather that has forced millions of people across Europe, many of them in homes without air-conditioning and with few options for refuge, to endure triple-digit temperatures.<\/p>\n

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Tourist icons of Paris\u2014the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre\u2014have been closing early. Thousands of schools across France (and elsewhere in Europe) have closed or changed hours, but others, also without air-conditioning, have remained open. The heat has disrupted train travel, spiked utility prices, and led to power blackouts for thousands in Brittany and in Italian cities such as Turin and Milan. French television showed throngs of people swimming in Paris\u2019s Canal Saint-Martin, once notorious for its pollution. Tuesday was the hottest day recorded in France in nearly 80 years. Yesterday was even hotter. Since the heat wave started, two children died in an over-hot car, and the rush to cool off has had its own terrible consequences\u2014at least 48 drownings across France since the heat wave began last week, according to French authorities. And that glass of wine? During Sunday\u2019s F\u00eate de la Musique, an annual music festival, outdoor alcohol consumption was restricted.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is just unbearable,\u201d Yamina Saheb, a lecturer at Sciences Po, told me. \u201cWe are locked in the heat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saheb, an expert on adapting buildings to the warming atmosphere and an author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, has been rising at 3 a.m. to work in the slightly cooler overnight hours. She took her 6-year-old son to an evening movie for a brief escape. On Sunday, she fainted in her apartment in the 14th arrondissement, in the southern part of Paris. \u201cI was so tired at that point. I\u2019m not old, and I don\u2019t have any health issue, but I cannot stand the heat,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Only about a quarter of France\u2019s housing stock has air-conditioning, a much smaller proportion than in the United States and other parts of the world. Much of that housing is ill-suited to the extended stretches of dangerous heat that have blanketed Europe in recent decades. A notorious heat wave in August 2003 killed an estimated 70,000 people across the continent, and even though European countries have tried since then to protect themselves by establishing cooling sites and making registries for vulnerable people, those measures do not appear to be keeping up with the threat. The World Health Organization says that heat has killed more than 200,000 people across Europe in the past four years.<\/p>\n

Paris authorities announced plans yesterday to extend hours at public swimming pools; some 1,400 cooling spots, including misting stations and fountains, were open across the city. Authorities were also conducting welfare checks on individuals, the city said in a statement. In Paris, many buildings have zinc roofs and are made of concrete (both materials trap heat); some lack shutters or blinds; top-level apartments are notorious for their ovenlike qualities on hot days. In a week like this, such spaces \u201chave become uninhabitable,\u201d as a story in Le Monde<\/em> put it. The French entertainer Olivier Giraud, known for his show How to Become a Parisian in One Hour<\/em>, demonstrated that he could seemingly cook various dishes\u2014l\u2019oeuf campagnard<\/em> (country-style eggs), cote de boeuf<\/em> (rib eye)\u2014by letting a frying pan heat on his window ledge. He suggested in one video that people come to the theater for his one-man show, where at least \u201cwe have air-conditioning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Maynooth University, in Ireland, was attending a climate-adaptation conference in Oxford this week; he stepped out of his hotel into a humid mid-90s afternoon that he described to me as a \u201csauna.\u201d (Yesterday also set the record for the hottest June day in the United Kingdom.) He has been alarmed by the magnitude of this heat event, which is Europe\u2019s second extraordinary heat wave in a month and which has been breaking records by large margins, and early in the summer. \u201cWe\u2019d expect records to be broken, yes, but we wouldn\u2019t expect them to be smashed to smithereens,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is absolutely not normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The weather pattern responsible, a heat dome sealed in by an area of high pressure, is itself nothing new. But now \u201cwe have loaded the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for the past 200 years,\u201d which traps heat in the atmosphere, Thorne said. Reduced sea ice and snowpack don\u2019t help. Temperatures in Western Europe are about 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, depending on location, than they would have been in similar weather patterns during the second half of the 20th century, the organization ClimaMeter estimated.<\/p>\n

Those elevated temperatures are expected to last through the week while moving north and east, possibly into Scandinavia, across cities and towns that were designed to trap heat, not dispel it, Thorne said. The improvements in forecasting and early-warning systems, as well as plans for cooling sites, will help reduce the death toll, but Thorne still expects it to be substantial. \u201cThis is truly extraordinary, unprecedented weather happening in places that are simply not designed to cope with this kind of heat,\u201d he said. \u201cEurope\u2019s not prepared for this in the slightest.\u201d<\/p>\n

In France, access to air-conditioning has become a hot-button political debate; some far-right politicians have been pushing an AC-for-everyone message, while people on the left worry about the cost and environmental impact. Vidhya Ragunathan, an American attorney who has lived in Paris for nearly four years, has noticed that a surprising number of people still use handheld or paper fans; for her part, she\u2019s running the fans and portable AC units in her third-floor apartment, which isn\u2019t in direct sunlight most of the day. \u201cThis is where the American in me comes out: Those fans will run when somebody\u2019s in that room,\u201d she told me. \u201cI don\u2019t need heatstroke to throw on my plate right now.\u201d Her children\u2019s school remains open but has encouraged parents to keep kids home, and it has been sending letters asking which children intend to show up each day. \u201cI throw a bunch of ice cubes in my kids\u2019 water bottle, and I\u2019m like, \u2018Let\u2019s go to school. We have five days left,\u2019\u201d she said. She\u2019s found that some metros and buses have air-conditioning, whereas others do not; public transportation has faced delays and interruptions. An important appointment that she had at a government office, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been canceled because of the temperature. \u201cThe thing I\u2019ve learned about Paris is the city is completely capable of handling winter and rain; it cannot handle any sort of summer at all,\u201d Ragunathan said. \u201cFrance buckles under heat.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a school in Morlaix, Brittany, for children with learning disabilities and mental-health issues, some of the live-in students have tried to escape the heat by sleeping in hallways, the school\u2019s director, Lena Bleunven, told me. Teachers have taped newspapers over the windows to block out the sun. Without air-conditioning, the school, where some 50 students spend the night, is relying on 15 fans to stay cool. \u201cI should have bought more, but we never had this,\u201d Bleunven said, and there were \u201cno more fans in shops.\u201d Last week, she\u2019d asked regional health officials, who oversee the school, if they planned to close it for the heat wave, but she was told that there was an obligation to continue public service, she said.<\/p>\n

In Saheb\u2019s flat in Paris, in a building built in 1959, window AC units are not allowed on the facade that faces Parc Montsouris; on the back side, such an addition requires consensus among all owners in the building, who have so far refused, she said. After she fainted on Sunday, she wrote an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron from her cellar\u2014\u201cthe only habitable place\u201d in her building, as she described it. Macron, in a message on X, had urged people to look out for one another during the heat wave, particularly children and the elderly. (Macron\u2019s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Saheb considered that message insufficient and criticized Macron for failing to do more to help France adapt to this climate emergency. \u201cI don\u2019t know about you, but I refuse to hand down to my son a country where the only refuge is the basement, and the only survival strategy is fending for oneself,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt is just unbearable,\u201d one Paris resident said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-planet"],"yoast_head":"\nEurope Cannot Cope With This Heat - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=852\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Europe Cannot Cope With This Heat - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cIt is just unbearable,\u201d one Paris resident said.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=852\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-25T12:41:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Europe Cannot Cope With This Heat\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-25T12:41:40+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852\"},\"wordCount\":1482,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/1af794f44f78378d7b333ece05b665dc.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Planet\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=852\",\"name\":\"Europe Cannot Cope With This Heat - 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