Newsweek claims in the recent article, “Hundreds Die in Record-Breaking Europe Heat Wave: How Long Will It Last,” that the current deadly European heat wave demonstrates the growing dangers of climate change, suggesting that rising greenhouse gas emissions are making heat domes more frequent and more dangerous. This is false. The real story is not climate change, rather it is Europe’s decades-long failure to allow its people to equip themselves with the most effective protection against extreme heat: air conditioning.
There is no question that heat waves can be deadly, particularly for the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions. Newsweek reports that hundreds of deaths have occurred across Spain, France, and other parts of Europe during the current heat wave.
The obvious question is why. If climate change were the primary cause of these deaths, one would expect countries with the hottest climates to suffer the greatest mortality. Yet places such as Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Nevada routinely endure temperatures well above 100°F every summer without experiencing comparable spikes in heat-related deaths.
The difference is not the weather, the difference is policies, in this case policies restricting or disincentivizing air conditioning.
More than 90 percent of American homes have air conditioning. In much of the southern United States, it is nearly universal. Hospitals, nursing homes, schools, offices, shopping centers, and private residences all provide refuge from dangerous heat. Europe chose a different, deadly, path.
In contrast, only about 20 percent of homes across Europe have air conditioning, and in the United Kingdom the figure is less than 5 percent. Germany’s adoption rate is similarly low. Those numbers are not the result of technological limitations. They are the result of decades of government policy and environmental ideology discouraging air conditioning in favor of reducing electricity consumption to avoid carbon dioxide emissions. Interestingly, it is the homes and business of wealthy elites, those who often endorse limiting air conditioning use, that most often have air conditioning.
Britain is perhaps the clearest example of this policy madness.
As recently reported by both The New York Times and AOL, British building regulations and planning guidance have long emphasized “passive cooling” while treating air conditioning as something to be avoided whenever possible. Many homes, schools, offices, and even some hospitals were built or renovated without air conditioning because policymakers viewed it as environmentally undesirable. Those decisions have consequences.
When temperatures climb into the 90s, millions of people simply have no practical way to cool their homes. That is not a climate failure, it is a policy failure. Ironically, many of the same governments that discourage air conditioning during normal times respond to heat emergencies by opening air-conditioned cooling centers. In France, designated public cooling centers (often called salles fraîches) can be found in city halls, gymnasiums, and libraries.
In other words, officials fully understand that air conditioning saves lives. They simply have spent years making it harder for people to have that protection in their own homes.
As Climate Realism explained in its rebuttal to Time magazine earlier this year, air conditioners are saving people from heat. They are not causing a public health crisis.
Newsweek also attributes the current event to a persistent high-pressure system known as a heat dome. That explanation is correct. Heat domes are well-understood meteorological phenomena called an Omega Block that have occurred throughout the historical record, as seen in the figure below by the Telegraph UK.
Where the article goes astray is claiming that climate change is making these events more frequent and more severe. The experts quoted give expectations based largely on climate model projections, not direct observational evidence. They argue that greenhouse gases shift the baseline temperature upward, making heat extremes more likely.
That is a hypothesis supported primarily by climate models. Models are not data, and some climate models are so bad they have been relieved of duty.
Europe has experienced devastating heat waves for centuries. The deadly 2003 European heat wave occurred long before today’s record emphasis on attribution studies. Earlier heat waves occurred throughout the twentieth century and well before modern concerns about greenhouse gases. A good example is the 1976 British Isles heatwave, at a time when the Earth was cooling and many scientists were warning the next ice age could the coming. There is no observational evidence of a long-term trend of timing, location, or severity of heat domes which might indicate climate change meteorologically modifying such events.
Omega block heat domes develop because of atmospheric circulation patterns, persistent high-pressure systems, soil moisture conditions, and regional weather dynamics. They are short-term weather events that have existed for as long as humanity has existed and long before humans studied weather.
What determines whether those weather events become humanitarian disasters are these preparedness factors:
- Affordable electricity.
- Reliable electric grids.
- Access to cooling.
- Emergency response systems.
These are the factors that save lives. Instead of emphasizing those practical solutions, Newsweek largely recycles the now-familiar narrative that climate change is the underlying culprit. That framing wrongly overlooks the far more immediate cause of Europe’s vulnerability.
The continent has spent years pursuing energy policies that increased electricity prices while simultaneously discouraging one of the greatest public health technologies ever invented.
Air conditioning has saved millions of lives worldwide. It dramatically reduces heat stress, prevents dehydration, and protects the elderly during extreme weather. Treating it as an environmental problem rather than a public health solution has been one of Europe’s most costly mistakes.
According to the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, air conditioning is one of the most significant public health interventions in history, averting hundreds of thousands of premature heat-related deaths annually. By dramatically reducing vulnerability to extreme heat, residential cooling has become a critical lifeline, especially for the elderly and vulnerable populations worldwide.
Newsweek presents Europe’s heat wave as another chapter in the climate crisis, but the evidence points to it being another chapter in a political/social policy crisis, putting unjustified fears of future climate change based on non-existent evidence ahead of the needs of real people living today.
Europe’s recurring heat deaths are the predictable consequence of governments discouraging the very technology that has protected Americans, and elites in in their own countries, from deadly summer heat for generations.
Until policymakers stop treating air conditioning as a climate villain and start recognizing it as a lifesaving technology, Europe will continue paying the price for ideology disguised as environmental policy. Newsweek is derelict in their journalistic duty to point this out.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
