A heatwave in Europe in 2003 caused an enormous number of deaths (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)
Read more: “Climate change: It’s even worse than we thought“
In August 2003, Europe was hit by an extraordinary heatwave. In parts of France, the temperature hit 40 °C for seven days in a row. So many people died that a refrigerated warehouse near Paris was co-opted to store bodies. A study in 2008 concluded that . Most of the victims were elderly or ill, but not all.
Heat has more subtle effects, too. The . If it gets too hot, people begin to suffer from exhaustion, heatstroke and kidney failure.
Recent studies suggest the effects of climate change on human health and economic output have been underestimated. “I suspect heat stress will prove the single worst aspect of climate change,” says , an atmospheric scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
What matters is not so much the air temperature but the temperature of our skin: sweating cools our skin, but is less effective in humid conditions. The combined effect of heat and humidity can be gauged by the wet-bulb temperature of a “sweating” thermometer – a thermometer wrapped in a damp cloth.
Currently, the maximum wet-bulb temperatures reached anywhere on the planet do not exceed 31 °C, but we do not expect that to remain so. “All our models show a ,…
