Medics in Britain and France warned hospitals were struggling with the heat and a surge in emergency calls.Authorities have reported hundreds of people dead in Spain and others across Europe, including several children who died in hot cars.Some cooler air breezed over western parts, but central and eastern Europe warned their heatwaves had yet to peak, with the Czech Republic and Hungary on red alert for the weekend and temperatures of up to 40C forecast.Scientists have shown that recurring heatwaves are a clear marker of global warming driven by humans burning fossil fuels -- and are set to become more frequent, longer and more intense.Heat domeAt a homeless shelter on Thursday in Berlin, where the temperature topped 33C, Christian Bernardt, 52, found relief in a cool room."The heat is exhausting... Nobody was expecting this heatwave," he said."It's very tiring, especially when you have to walk down the street with all your luggage, wandering from train station to train station."
Parisians slept in parks © Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP
The deputy director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, Samantha Burgess, said the hot weather was due to a "heat dome" of trapped air from north Africa in a low-lying high-pressure system."The weather pattern itself is not particularly unusual," climate scientist Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution (WWA), told reporters"But the temperatures are -- or at least they used to be, without human-induced climate change."150 mn at 35CAt least 150 million people in Europe were expected to experience temperatures above 35C on Friday, according to AFP calculations based on forecasts.Maximum temperatures were forecast to exceed 30C for more than 420 million people across Europe, excluding Turkey -- around 70 percent of the population.
