Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:
This summer’s heat waves have brought new levels of suffering. Across Europe, several countries—Germany, Hungary, France, the UK, Poland, Spain, Denmark—recorded their hottest-ever June days. As temperatures climbed toward 40°C, motorways were closed, train services suspended, nuclear plants put offline. Scorching temperatures and dry ground have given rise to wildfires across Southern Europe, with more expected as the summer continues. In Switzerland, the “Glacier Loss Day” threshold, when annual snowfall has all been melted and the glaciers start being eaten by the heat, was reached on June 29, months ahead of the typical end-of-summer timing—the second-earliest time ever on record.
In North America, too, temperatures soared, and the US National Weather Service placed 130 million people under an extreme heat warning earlier this month. As the power grid began to buckle, wholesale spot electricity prices rose more than 50 percent in the Midwest, doubled in New York City, and leapt by 240 percent in New England.
Heat waves tend to attract less attention than the charismatic megafauna of climate disasters—the floods, storms and wildfires—in part because they cause less property damage and are thus less obviously financially costly. But they are increasingly deadly, even if the number of deaths can be difficult to ascertain. It usually takes a person some days to expire from heat exposure, so the cause of death is more commonly attributed to organ or respiratory failure rather than heat.
More here.
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