Opinion: Europe's summer of heat

Children cool off as they play football under a fountain next to the Manzanares river on June 23, 2026 in Madrid, Spain. Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images hide caption

All 27 cities Italy's health ministry monitors, including Rome, Naples, Venice, and Bologna, are on red alert this week. People have been advised to avoid sunlight, sweet carbonated drinks, coffee and alcohol.

Imagine trying to avoid sunlight, fizz, wine, and espresso in Italy.

The World Meteorological Organization says this was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe. And now the heat has returned.

Great cities, like London, Paris, Madrid, Florence and Rome, that draw tourists to museums, markets, theaters, and restaurants, are considered especially open and exposed. Those beautiful cities are sculpted out of brick and stone, and connected by monumental asphalt avenues which absorb the heat, and hold onto it at night.

Officials in France are just beginning to get hold of the toll of the June heat wave. They count at least 5,700 "excess deaths" during the swelter that climbed to 111 degrees Fahrenheit in the early part of the summer. Many of those who died were elderly, often alone, in a stifling house or apartment. Germany recorded nearly 100 drownings during the worst of the June heat, many of them young men.

Funeral homes have at times run out of space to store and prepare bodies for burial. Zouhaier Hertelli, a Paris funeral director, told the Associated Press this summer he has had to gently inform grieving families there was no room for their loved ones.

"Families are suffering," he said. "We have no solution to offer them, because the funeral homes are full. We are really facing a problem, a big problem."

It is hard for me to hear those words and not think of funeral homes in war zones I have covered, that have also been full.

Scientists say the steady rise of heat caused by climate change may ignite more fires like the ones that swept France and Spain last month and those raging in the U.S., Canada and across the world.

The European Investment Bank and the European Commission released a study this summer that predicts farm losses in the European Union will climb in the coming decades, with droughts, heat and storms damaging crop yields and stressing animals.

2026 has been Europe's summer of heat. Until, perhaps, next summer; and summers to come. Americans, along with the rest of the world, know that feeling, too.