Europe’s next heat wave could kill as many people as the worst week of COVID

Europe’s next heat wave could kill as many people as the worst week of COVID

Some of the same weather patterns that brought Europe its worst heat waves in recent decades are still out there, circling the globe. The difference now is the background climate. The planet is hotter than it was when those events first struck, and that extra heat could turn a bad week into something closer to a mass casualty disaster. A new study in Nature Climate Change warns that if those familiar “heat dome” patterns return in today’s climat…