Tourists enjoy cooling off at a public water fountain In Paris, June 26. AP-Yonhap
BERLIN/MILAN/COPENHAGEN — From Scandinavia to the Alps, Europeans endured sweltering conditions on Saturday as a heat wave linked to dozens of deaths spread east, shattering records with temperatures in some areas soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Preliminary all-time temperature records were set on Saturday in Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic, and a new mark for the month of June in Switzerland. Similar records had been broken earlier this week in France and Britain.
Scientists said the stifling heat wave would have been virtually impossible without man-made climate change, which has made this week's night-time temperatures 100 times more likely than they would have been even two decades ago.
"This heat isn't pleasant summer weather. It's a health crisis," Katrin Goering-Eckardt, a German federal lawmaker and former parliamentary leader of the Green Party, said on X. Such was the heat in Berlin, where temperatures climbed to 39 C on Saturday, that police deployed two water cannons in the city to lightly spray people trying to cool down.
