Are Europe’s extreme summers the new normal? What the science says

Published 3 July 2026 · europe

WHO warns Europe must ‘plan for heat like winter flu’ as experts reveal how permanent this summer’s extreme heat is. Temperatures in Europe hit a

WHO warns Europe must ‘plan for heat like winter flu’ as experts reveal how permanent this summer’s extreme heat is. Temperatures in Europe hit a new high this summer, with hotter early-summer heatwaves triggering illness, deaths and the collapse of infrastructure across the continent. Transport buckled on Sunday as temperatures hit 40C (104F) across Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland. In France, days averaging 29.8C (85.6F) – spiking to 44C (111.2F) in one town – gave way to storms, leaving an estimated 1,000 excess deaths behind. Scenes like this may well be the new normal. Last summer’s heatwave alone caused an estimated 2,300 climate-related deaths in 12 European countries, WWA says. A study by World Weather Attribution (WWA) has found that intense heat on this level is now tens to hundreds of times more likely than it was in 2003, and was unheard of 50 years ago. “Heat-related mortality is likely to remain a feature of Europe’s warming climate,” warns Dr Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s regional director for Europe. Deaths have already risen by an average of 52 per million people annually since the 1990s, he told Al Jazeera – a trend he says shows little sign of reversing on its own. So what does this mean for the future? Are these temperatures the new normal, and if so, why? We asked the climate experts Is this really the new normal? Yes, it certainly looks that way. According to WWA, heatwaves were generally about 3.5C cooler in June 1976, and 2C cooler even in 2003.

“Think of it like a race where the starting line has been moved much closer to the finish,” Dr Akshay Deoras of the University of Reading told Al Jazeera. Ultimately, this is down to global warming, he says. Europe has warmed at roughly twice the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Commission’s climate change service, Copernicus. Deoras says this amounts to “loading the dice” towards once-rare extremes. WWA’s modelling goes further: at current emissions rates, an event of the magnitude of this summer’s heatwave is expected to occur every couple of decades – and today’s extremes are effectively a preview of what an ordinary summer could look like by the middle of the century. Why is this happening in Europe now? The immediate trigger is a stalled high-pressure system, or a “heat dome”, which traps heat in one concentrated area for days or weeks. Heat domes aren’t new, but Europe’s already-shifted baseline means the same pattern now produces far hotter outcomes than decades ago, Deoras told Al Jazeera. Professor Hannah Cloke of the University of Reading told Al Jazeera that’s because the warming behind new, extreme weather patterns comes from emissions released decades ago, and the climate system takes time to respond – so we’re feeling the effects now of pollution from the past. Copernicus’s European State of the Climate 2025 report confirms this: more than 95 percent of the continent saw above-average annual temperatures last year, alongside record Alpine glacier loss and the highest sea-surface temperatures ever measured in Europe.