Heat waves kill quietly, in numbers that arrive weeks after the temperatures fall. The count from Europe's record summer heat is now in, and it is large: well over 10,000 more people have died than would be expected in a normal year across the continent [1].
France carried the heaviest share. Its national health agency estimates nearly 5,800 excess deaths over roughly two weeks - the country's deadliest heat wave since the catastrophic summer of 2003 [1]. Germany, Belgium and Britain each counted thousands more [1].
Excess deaths are the honest measure of a heat wave because most are not recorded as heat deaths at all - they are heart attacks, strokes and respiratory failures pushed over the edge by days the body cannot cool from [1]. The 10,000 figure is what the temperatures cost above the ordinary toll.
Scientists were unusually direct about the cause. A World Weather Attribution analysis found the heat would have been far less likely without human-caused climate change [1] - which places the deaths not in a freak summer but in a trend that policy is still choosing whether to slow.
The number is the record: more than 10,000 people across Europe who did not come home from a heat wave that the warming climate made both hotter and likelier [1].
