Overview
- A Nature Climate Change paper estimates a 2003-style system today would trigger about 17,800 excess deaths in a week across Europe, compared with 9,000 absent warming.
- At 3°C of global warming, modeled weekly excess deaths from such a pattern could reach roughly 32,000.
- The analysis links the deadliest events to stalled high-pressure “heat domes” over drought-parched land, a setup that drove the 2003 Western Europe disaster.
- Researchers trained statistical and machine-learning models on meteorology, daily temperatures, and mortality from 924 subnational regions across five major heat waves between 1994 and 2023.
- Recent adaptation trends would avert only about one in ten otherwise expected deaths, and the authors warn health systems should prepare for surge conditions comparable to the worst weeks of COVID.