Europe Cannot Cope With This Heat

A summer escape to Paris, at least in the American mind, evokes a certain set of images: quiet strolls along the canals, long hours in bookstores and museums, a pleasant park bench, a glass of wine. Those pleasures are now contending with one of the most brutal and dangerous heat waves that Europe has faced in decades, a muggy, enervating stretch of weather that has forced millions of people across Europe, many of them in homes without air-conditioning and with few options for refuge, to endure triple-digit temperatures.Tourist icons of Paris—the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre—have been closing early. Thousands of schools across France (and elsewhere in Europe) have closed or changed hours, but others, also without air-conditioning, have remained open. The heat has disrupted train travel, spiked utility prices, and led to power blackouts for thousands in Brittany and in Italian cities such as Turin and Milan. French television showed throngs of people swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin, once notorious for its pollution. Tuesday was the hottest day recorded in France in nearly 80 years. Yesterday was even hotter. Since the heat wave started, two children died in an over-hot car, and the rush to cool off has had its own terrible consequences—at least 48 drownings across France since the heat wave began last week, according to French authorities. And that glass of wine? During Sunday’s Fête de la Musique, an annual music festival, outdoor alcohol consumption was restricted.“It is just unbearable,” Yamina Saheb, a lecturer at Sciences Po, told me. “We are locked in the heat.”Saheb, an expert on adapting buildings to the warming atmosphere and an author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, has been rising at 3 a.m. to work in the slightly cooler overnight hours. She took her 6-year-old son to an evening movie for a brief escape. On Sunday, she fainted in her apartment in the 14th arrondissement, in the southern part of Paris. “I was so tired at that p