France records its hottest day ever as Europe withers in early heat wave

France’s previous hottest days were recorded during heat waves of August 2003 and July 2019, with an average temperature of 29.4 C (84.9 F).

Temperature records also tumbled at individual weather stations and on consecutive days in some towns as daytime highs climbed well above 40 C (104 F), Meteo France said.

In the French capital, Gin Dujardin said the heat forced him to halt his work fixing roofs, which in Paris often have galvanized zinc coverings.

“It’s very, very hard because the zinc is very hot. The welds don’t hold,” he said. “It’s Dubai temperatures. It’s impossible.”

France has recorded 40 fatalities from drowning in the past week as people seek relief in rivers and other bodies of water, despite authorities’ warnings about unsupervised swimming. Most of the drownings involved young people, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said.

Meteo France said the heat wave has reached what it described as a “plateau of severity,” with unrelenting heat, day and night. A growing number of regions will tip into the red again Wednesday as the heat spreads across more than half of the country, including the northernmost tip of France, the weather service said.

Human-caused climate change is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and U.N. climate agency projections say the next five years are likely to shatter more heat records.

The Louvre and the Eiffel Tower close early

In a country without widespread air conditioning, schools, public transportation and sporting events have been affected. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower closed in the afternoon instead of late at night, as it usually does. The Louvre museum said it would close two hours earlier than normal from Wednesday through Saturday.

“Although parts of its historic building are naturally resilient, the museum remains vulnerable and is not sufficiently adapted to climate change,” Louvre officials said. “Heat buildup is greatest toward the end of the day and is further intensified by high visitor numbers.”

This heat wave, coming early in the summer, has already been compared to the August 2003 heat wave that roasted France with the highest temperatures in over half a century. It caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them among older people in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organization’s Europe office said this month.

The above-average temperatures can cause heat exhaustion and life-threatening heat stroke.

Rail systems are strained by high temperatures

Hundreds of British schools planned to close or close early this week because of the heat, while many train services were reduced to avoid heat-related problems on the rail lines.

The Met Office, the U.K. weather agency, issued a heat warning for Wednesday and Thursday, with forecasts suggesting June’s all-time daily temperature record could be broken.

Temperatures of around 37 degrees C (98.6 F) are expected in southern England, with up to 35 C (95 F) in southeast Wales. The peak of the heat wave is now forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, when highs could reach 39 C (102.2 F) in London or southern England.

Conditions are expected to ease by Friday, the Met Office said.

On Tuesday, multiple U.K. train operators, including the express train serving London Gatwick Airport, said they were canceling or reducing services. Railway operators urged people to travel only if “absolutely necessary” on Wednesday and Thursday.

Heat waves could become more frequent and longer

Further south, Spain faced a heat wave across parts of the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain’s national weather service, Aemet, issued red alerts Tuesday for temperatures of 44 C (111 F) in southern Andalusia as well as warnings of thermometers hitting 40 C (104 F) in the normally temperate Cantabria and the Basque Country regions along the country’s northern Atlantic coast.

Aemet meteorologist Rubén del Campo said Spain, which has experienced increasingly torrid summers, is only going to get hotter because of climate change as heat waves become more frequent, longer and occur outside the traditional window of July and August.

Of the dozen heat waves Aemet has recorded in June since it started tracking them in 1975, half have occurred since 2015, del Campo said.

Human-driven climate change is heating up the atmosphere, both above Spain and in the surrounding sea waters, he said.

Copernicus, the EU weather monitoring agency, found that in Europe and globally, 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the continent experienced its second-highest number of “heat stress” days.

Scientists warn that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness, especially in southeastern Europe, making the region more vulnerable to health impacts and wildfires.

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Associated Press journalists John Leicester in Paris, Sylvia Hui in London and Joseph Wilson in Barcelona, Spain, contributed to this report.

Samuel Petrequin, The Associated Press

by The Canadian Press

France records its hottest day ever as Europe withers in early heat wave

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