Europe's heatwave can no longer be measured in degrees Celsius alone — it is measured in the number of things it has forced people to change. In France, people have abandoned their homes because they can no longer sleep. In Germany, the public has been urged to avoid train travel as the heat threatens infrastructure. In Paris, hospitals have called in extra medical staff after emergency departments filled to capacity. And in the Swiss Alps, glaciers are melting weeks ahead of schedule.
Such was another day in the heatwave gripping Europe.
In the French city of Tours, Véronique decided to leave her home for a hotel — not in search of a holiday, but of a night's sleep. She told Reuters that the heat inside her house had become unbearable and that she could no longer even think straight, so she chose to spend part of her holiday budget on a hotel room, because what she needed above all else was "the ability to sleep."
She was not alone. The chief executive of one French hotel group told Reuters that they were receiving daily requests from families fleeing their apartments, and that hotels had filled up within just two weeks as the heatwave intensified. But while some Europeans were searching for a cooler room, others were ending up in hospital. According to Agence France-Presse, emergency service calls in the Paris region rose by around 80% in a single week. Antoine Alibert, Paris's deputy mayor for health affairs, described the situation as a "health crisis," confirming that hospitals were experiencing "exceptional overcrowding."
The head of the emergency department at the Georges Pompidou Hospital, one of the capital's largest, warned that the situation was "extremely serious," with corridors packed with patients suffering from severe hyperthermia — most of them elderly, but also including people in their 50s and 60s.
Across wide swathes of the continent, the heat has ceased to be merely a figure on a weather screen.
According to an analysis by Agence France-Presse, approximately 193 million people — including 75 million in Germany — are living through days on which temperatures exceed 35 degrees Celsius.
In Germany, the national meteorological service recorded a preliminary all-time high of 41.5 degrees Celsius, with forecasts suggesting some regions could reach 42 degrees.
The exceptional conditions prompted Deutsche Bahn to urge passengers to avoid non-essential travel, warning that extreme heat could affect rail tracks and signalling systems, while other operators suspended some train lines for several hours.
The effects of the heatwave have not been confined to cities. In Switzerland, Mathias Huss, head of the glacier monitoring network GLAMOS, told Agence France-Presse that the country would by Monday reach what is known as the "glacier loss day" — the point at which all the snow and ice that accumulated over winter has melted — marking only the second earliest such date on record since measurements began.
Elsewhere, music festivals and sporting events were cancelled, dress codes were relaxed in concert halls, and the army was deployed in Hungary to distribute water to residents, while other countries prepared to raise their highest alert levels as the heatwave moved eastward.
The World Meteorological Organization has suggested this heatwave may be unprecedented in its geographical extent, while scientists note that global warming is making intense heatwaves more frequent and more severe, though determining its precise role in any individual event requires specialised scientific study.
Véronique may sum up the whole picture: when a person leaves their home because they can no longer sleep, hospitals become emergency wards, trains slow down and glaciers begin disappearing ahead of schedule, the issue is no longer simply that the temperature reached 42 degrees Celsius — it is that millions of people have been forced to change their lives because of it.