If you were to ask people which weather extremes they are afraid of, they would probably first mention the spectacular events: hurricanes, thunderstorms, floods. Sure, it’s impressive, very destructive and can also be life-threatening if the weather starts with wind or heavy rain, you’ve often seen that only too well.
But when it comes to identifying the cumulative deadliest disasters, by far the worst killer is a much more silent and everyday phenomenon; one that even arouses great leisure enthusiasm time and time again. These are heat waves like the one currently affecting Spain and France and which will also be visiting Germany at the weekend.
According to the German Weather Service (DWD), it could get up to around 38 degrees in some places on Saturday, especially in the west and south-west. The reason is a high that is moving east over Germany and is dragging hot air from the southwest behind it. In principle, this weather situation is nothing unusual, not even in June.
Heat is life-threatening, especially for old and sick people
However, everything is coming together at the moment that extreme heat is possible for the time of year. The previous June record for Germany is 38.6 degrees, set in the heat wave at the end of June 2019. According to DWD information, it has never been more than 38.3 degrees in the middle of the month, this record from 2002 could now be broken will.
Such heat is life-threatening, especially for old and sick people. It’s hard to say exactly who on the heat and who only at Heat died, you know the topic from the pandemic. But the death statistics regularly show clear swings in the period of major heat waves, even if the causes of death are ultimately more strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure or respiratory diseases. A study by the Robert Koch Institute, Charité and DWD in 2019 came to several hundred to several thousand heat-related deaths per year.
Climate change is making heat waves more violent and frequent, which has been clearly noticeable for a long time. Adaptation to this is overdue. Many nursing homes don’t even have proper shutters or blinds in all rooms, let alone air conditioning. Municipal heat action plans to warn and protect sensitive population groups are far from being implemented everywhere. And in the long term, cities need to go from sweltering heat islands to sponge cities, cooled by abundant vegetation. There is still a lot of room for improvement here, too. You’ll regret it if that doesn’t change soon.