An international research team led by scientists from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) announced that the summer of 2022 was the hottest on record in Europe, marked by an intense series of heatwaves, droughts and wildfires that broke records, and directly and indirectly caused the death of about 62,<> people.
To reach these results, which were published on the tenth of July in the journal "Nature Medicine", the research team obtained temperature and mortality data in 823 regions in 35 European countries with a total population of more than 543 million people, and then used these data to estimate epidemiological statistical models to predict mortality and their relationship to temperature for each region and each week of the summer period.
According to the study, about two-thirds of the deaths occurred mainly due to the heat waves that hit Europe between July 11 and August 14 last year 2022. Italy was the most affected country in terms of the number of deaths relative to the number of citizens, followed by Greece, Spain and Portugal, and there was a very noticeable increase in the death rate in older age groups, especially women, according to an official press release by the institute.
Climate change is the cause
Scientists in this research community agree that scientific evidence over the past century shows that human activity (mainly human burning of fossil fuels) has led to warming of the Earth's surface and ocean basins, which in turn has continued to affect the Earth's climate.
Fossil fuels cause carbon dioxide to be spewed into the atmosphere, and this gas is able to prevent Earth's heat from penetrating into space again after being absorbed from sunlight, causing the atmosphere to warm.
This consequently leads to an increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of climate anomalies, especially heat waves, and the US Environmental Protection Agency indicated that the frequency, intensity and length of heat waves have been increasing clearly in the United States and the world since the sixties of the 20th century, and is expected to increase at greater rates in the future.
Britain's highest temperature recorded in June was 32.2 degrees Celsius (Getty Images)
It's happening right now.
The UK Met Agency recently announced that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland reported the warmest June ever in the century-and-a-half measurement history, adding that human-induced climate change is pushing those records to become more frequent in the next few decades.
The highest temperature recorded in June is 32.2 degrees Celsius, and in a northern country such as the United Kingdom, this figure represents a heat wave, as those regions are accustomed to temperatures in the twenties during June each year.
In addition, June 2023 also ranked fourth in the list of months most exposed to the sun on record, and was drier than the general average of the country, where the rainfall rate was about 30% lower.