Pull up a chair, because I have got a report nobody wanted to write. More than thirteen hundred people are dead across Europe in about a week. Not from a war. From the weather. And the man who runs the World Health Organization stood up, looked at the numbers, and said three words I cannot stop hearing. We were warned.
“We were warned.”
- Dr. Tedros, WHO Director-General
Let me lay out the situation the way I was trained to. No spin, just the record. Since June twenty-first, the World Health Organization counts more than thirteen hundred excess deaths tied to this heat. France alone logged around a thousand more deaths than a normal week. And of the people who died there, eighty-five percent were sixty-five or older. That is not a statistic. That is somebody's grandmother who did not make it to July.
1,300+ - excess deaths across Europe since June 21 (WHO)
** 85% - of France's heat deaths were people aged 65 or over
**
Now I spent forty years voting Republican, and for most of that time I treated the word climate like a sales pitch. So when I tell you the science here is not a guess, I am arguing with my own younger self. Scientists who study this ran the numbers on this exact heat wave. They found it is about two hundred times more likely now than it was a couple decades back, and it would have been virtually impossible just five decades ago without the warming we caused.
200x - more likely than two decades ago - World Weather Attribution
**
And it broke records doing it. Germany hit forty-one point seven degrees Celsius, three days running. For the folks at home that is about a hundred and seven Fahrenheit, in a country where most houses do not even have air conditioning because they never needed it before. The WHO chief put it plain. European homes, workplaces and schools were not built for these temperatures. He is right. We built for the world we used to have.
“European homes, workplaces and schools were not built for these temperatures.”
- Dr. Tedros, WHO Director-General
Here is the part that turns my stomach as a guy who used to balance budgets. This is not the first report. Back on June eleventh, before this latest round of dying even started, the same WHO put out a statement. Over the last four years, heat killed more than two hundred thousand people across Europe. And here is the line I cannot shake. They said most of those deaths were entirely preventable.
200,000+ - heat deaths across Europe in 4 years - WHO, June 11
** THE FILE WE IGNORED
- WHO warned on June 11
- 200,000+ heat deaths in 4 years
- Most of them entirely preventable
So let me do the casualty count, the part of the report I hate the most. The dead, first. More than thirteen hundred this week, and counting. The old folks who could not cool down. But there is a second casualty here that does not show up in a morgue. It is the warning itself. We had the report. We filed it. And we put it in a drawer.
CASUALTIES
- 1,300+ dead this week, mostly elderly
- The warning we filed and ignored
- Preventable, by the experts' own word
Now somebody is already typing that I have gone soft, that this is just hot summer weather and the left wants to tax your truck over it. So let me be straight, the way I always try to be. The WHO chief did not say a bad thing happened. He said the once-in-a-generation heat wave is now happening nearly every single year. That is not a vibe. That is a trend line, and a trend line does not care how you voted.
“The once-in-a-generation heatwave is now occurring nearly annual. We were warned.”
- Dr. Tedros, WHO Director-General
And before anybody says nothing could be done, that is the part that actually makes me angry. There is a fix, and it is boring, which is how you know it is real. Heat health action plans. Early warning systems that tell an old man on the fourth floor to get to a cool room today. Checking on the neighbor. The experts say plainly that these plans save lives. We are not waiting on a miracle cure. We are waiting on a phone tree.
WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS
- Heat-health action plans
- Early warning systems
- Check on the neighbor
Here is the honest assessment, and it is not a comfortable one. We were warned, in writing, by the people whose whole job is to warn us. The heat came anyway, on schedule, and it took more than thirteen hundred people who did not have to die. You can argue about a carbon tax. You cannot argue with a death certificate, and you sure cannot argue with thirteen hundred of them.
THE HONEST ASSESSMENT
- We were warned, in writing
- 1,300+ dead who didn't have to die
- The trend doesn't care how you voted
So file it with the rest of the reports we should have read the first time. The neighbor on the fourth floor was not the enemy. The heat was, and we knew it was coming. We used to expect better, and we should again. Anyway. Facts are hard to argue with. I'm Mark, and this is Pixel Politics.
