WHO reports record-breaking heat wave in Europe kills over 1,300 people

As a heat wave is on the horizon for Ontario, many countries in Europe have already been struggling with record-breaking temperatures for days.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says the heat has led to more than 1,300 excess deaths, calling Europe the fastest-warming continent on Earth.

By 9 a.m., a beach in the seaside town of Sopot, Poland was already getting busy.

A local lifeguard says making sure everyone stays safe on these days of extreme heat is a challenge.

“I was pretty terrified,” said Joanna Piasecka. “I started thinking about the sun protection and what am I going to do to not pass out on the tower.”

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Sunday, Poland saw a record-breaking 40.5 C inland, hot enough to fry an egg on a car, as a local news station demonstrated.

That’s the same temperature as a lower setting on a stove burner, and definitely hot enough to scramble some eggs.

Poland is one of the many European countries that’s seeing record-breaking temperatures amid a heat wave impacting France, Italy, Croatia, Romania and beyond.

“We’re breaking records for the number of records we’ve broken in Europe,” said David Phillips, the senior climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Phillips says the high-pressure system came up from the Sahara, and has created a heat dome over much of Europe.

“It’s like putting the Rogers Centre on top of a continent,” said Phillips,”and the air doesn’t circulate, it gets hotter and sinks. When air rises it cools, but when air sinks, when it goes from high pressure down to the surface, it warms up — it’s like squeezing the air, all those air molecules are bumping together, they generate heat, and that heat is trapped in that dome.”

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The heat has been fatal in many countries, with more than 1,300 heat-related deaths reported across the continent, according to the WHO.

Officials say a factor is that many buildings in these countries don’t have air conditioning, and are made entirely of thermally dense materials.

“So those buildings really hold onto the heat, which is a problem because overnight the temperatures typically come down, but because all of that heat has built up in the mass of the building — it unfortunately maintains uncomfortable temperatures overnight,” said Marianne Touchie, the associate professor of engineering at the University of Toronto.

Experts say this likely won’t be the last heat wave this summer in Europe.

Last week, the European group “World Weather Attribution” released a report saying that climate change is directly contributing to the extreme weather, as these temperatures would have been impossible to hit just over 20 years ago.

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