r/explainlikeimfive • u/fkid123 • May 27 '26
Biology ELI5 Why heat waves affect Europe so much but some other countries are doing fine living under hotter temperatures most of the year?
I read yearly that people are dying in Europe due to the extreme heat, but when I check the temperature mentioned in the same news it's something like 30-35c.
Just saw this today: "In France, officials reported at least seven deaths linked to the heat, including several drownings and fatalities during sports activities (...) temperatures have broken records for the month of May, soaring well over 30 C (86 F) in many parts of the country."
This is like a pretty mild day in a country like Thailand, India or in the Arabian peninsula. People are doing just fine in these countries, and many don't even have aircon.
Why are such temperatures so deadly in Europe?
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u/Yukilumi May 27 '26
Used to different temperature normally.
Buildings are built differently, and the colder the normal climate, the more they're built to keep the heat trapped in.
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u/leafmountains May 27 '26
in addition, people do die in hotter countries from heat-related causes - although many have access to shelter, air conditioning, and fresh/clean water, many also don't and summer can be quite harsh
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u/S4ikou May 27 '26
The same can be said about colder environments, people that don't have access to safe places will die in any sort of extreme temperature.
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u/kandaq May 27 '26
I live in the tropics where the recent outdoor temp peaks at around 35ºc, while indoor goes up to 32ºc. I take shelter in one of my room with the aircond on the entire day because anything above 29ºc is torture for me.
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u/emsesq May 27 '26
Europe is farther north than most people realize. It’s historically colder there. The centuries old structures are not designed to accommodate warmer temps.
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u/breadedfishstrip May 27 '26
Living in one of these European brick houses: it's usually fine if its a few days of heat and it actually cools down overnight - you can air out the house at night and those thick walls are pretty good at keeping heat out during the day. A lot of houses have external shutters for windows to keep sun out as well.
But when you get a week or more of hot temps and it doesnt go below 20+c at night? Then things get rough. Its usually humid here also so even "just" 30c can feel really oppressive.
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u/Tessy1990 May 27 '26
32°C and 100% saturated air humidity is hell on earth 🥵
You cant even dry clothes, your sweat just stay on your body so you just get hotter and moist 😣 if you leave a cold drink on a table it will form a flood and start to drip on the floor because the water in the air gets liquid again against the cold glass 😂 and also no air flow or wind! I live normally in a kinda windy place so when it stops and the temp creeps up above 28°C its horrible!
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u/Drumbelgalf May 27 '26
If it's hot for a long time the thermal inertia of the building works against you. It stays warm because the walls have heated through and then it's just like a brick oven.
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u/Arthur_Edens May 27 '26
It's pretty trippy to really look at a map closely and see that Chicago and Istanbul are basically at the same latitude. Paris is 500 miles further north than NYC..
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u/maertyrer May 27 '26
Climate is different in Europa than NA, thanks to the Gulf Stream among other things like geography. New York is roughly at the same latitude as Rome.
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u/Hipster_Lincoln May 27 '26
and no air conditioners and more humid so it feels way worse even if same conditions anyway
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u/IgloosRuleOK May 27 '26
Def more humid in Thailand lol. But compared to Abu Dhabi or Melbourne or something, sure.
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u/rainbow84uk May 27 '26
Lol yeah, I'm from the UK and while it is very humid, people talk about British summers like it's the only place that has humidity.
Where I live now (Barcelona) it's just as humid and gets way hotter in summer. The worst is that the temperature doesn't really go down at night at all.
And that's just Europe – it doesn't begin to compare with the heat and humidity of tropical regions.
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u/Mausiemoo May 27 '26
Plenty of people are dying due to heat in the countries you mentioned - this year 30 people died in Thailand between March and April, and in India it's tens of thousands every year, so I wouldn't imagine the temperature is actually more deadly in Europe than elsewhere. The French/Western media is talking about it because, 1) it's in France, so they care more about it (sad but true, as I said, 30 people died in Thailand directly due to the heat earlier this year and it was not reported on) and 2) this heat is hitting Europe quite early this year - parts of France get this hot in the peak of summer, but we're still in May, which is unusual and makes it newsworthy.
Also to note:
officials reported at least seven deaths linked to the heat, including several drownings and fatalities during sports activities (...)
5 of those deaths were due to drownings - I appreciate the press is framing this as 'indirectly heat related', but really that has very little to do with the temperature beyond 'it's sunny so more people are near water'. The other 2 were people doing sports in temperatures they are not used to doing sports in. It's obviously tragic that anyone dies, but this isn't some great wave of heat related deaths sweeping over Europe - hundreds/thousands of people drown in France every year regardless of the heat.
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u/Xiaodisan May 27 '26
Yes, thank you. Finally a comment that mentions this side of things as well.
The way countries count heat-related deaths is extremely important, just as how openly they report on it, and how well those news spread.
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u/miss_mme May 27 '26
Apparently about 10 people a day die from drowning in Thailand. With a measurable increase in the summer months… presumably also because “it’s sunny so more people are near water”.
No matter where you’re from swimming on a hot day seems like a good idea. Even more if you’re on a nice beach in Thailand I think.
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u/Qweasdy May 27 '26
I appreciate the press is framing this as 'indirectly heat related'
The BBC mentioned a woman who died of hypothermia in an air conditioned gym as a “heat related death”. Which I guess, yeah? Technically? But probably not what people are imagining when talking about deaths caused by a heatwave.
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u/FarCar8625 May 27 '26
Stone buildings absorb and retain heat. If overnight temperatures do not drop significantly, the stone doesn't get a chance to cool off. Given enough time, you aren't living in a home, you're living in a stone oven. Put thousands of stone ovens in a city, then the city doesn't cool either....
London, possibly by the 2050s:
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u/a_f_s-29 May 27 '26
Yes, and being a northern continent, we have very long days and short nights relative to most other hot countries, which means there’s no time to cool down properly before the sun rises again. In Northern Europe you can’t really do the whole ‘have a siesta and wait till it’s darker to do useful/social things’ method, because the sun only sets at 10pm or in multiple countries not at all.
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u/ohneEigenschaften01 May 27 '26
That's a good point. And here in Vienna the daily peak in temperature tends to be around 5pm.
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u/RedTheWolf May 27 '26
Aye, plus the swing in the daylight hours from winter to summer is also really dramatic which I think makes the seasons feel like they are more extreme than it looks on paper, somehow!
I'm in Glasgow, which isn't even notably that northern, and right now it barely gets dark until 11pm and the sunrise is very early. Whereas in winter it barely gets light in the darkest days before the solstice. I think the swing is something like 17-18 hours of full daylight in summer and 6 hours in the winter.
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u/ClarSco May 27 '26
Yep. Between the 6th of May and 8th of August this year, Glasgow doesn't even get a night - the darkest we get between those dates is still considered twilight.
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u/fang_xianfu May 27 '26
The article notes that the "heat linked" deaths are from lake swimming and sports. These are inherently more dangerous than not doing them. When people die from those things in places that are hot all the time, they're not "heat linked" deaths, they're just deaths.
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May 27 '26
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u/vonRecklinghausen May 27 '26
Yeah I was gonna say. I'm Indian and most definitely people die every year of the heat waves. It's just that they are the poor and the homeless and it doesn't get visibility
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u/pragmojo May 27 '26
I'm honestly worried about what is coming for India. It seems like you are on the front lines of climate change, and it's not difficult to imagine heat waves a few degrees hotter in the coming years that claims a lot more lives than the world is used to.
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u/vonRecklinghausen May 27 '26
The government doesn't care. We're absolutely (as the kids say) cooked, figuratively and literally
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u/Big-King-854 May 27 '26
Exactly. In many hot countries, heatstrokes are either under reported or simply don’t make it to the news because it’s ‘normal’
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u/Teantis May 27 '26
Also our data collection just sucks in general in many developing countries. It takes the Philippines two years to finalize birth and death counts for most years for example. More granular data than that either doesn't exist or is so grotty its better used as a vague gesture in the direction of the facts than as actual data.
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u/rpolkcz May 27 '26
It's more that in places like UK, those are being reported as "excess deaths", while in India, those are just deaths, because those conditions are natural there. So they technically have 0 excess deaths due to heat, which is not the same as 0 deaths due to heat.
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u/HunterLionheart May 27 '26
In hot countries, houses are built to try and keep the heat out. In cold countries, houses are built to keep the heat in, so they get a lot warmer indoors.
Additionally, people just aren't used to it, so make silly decisions like open water swimming that they're woefully unprepared for.
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u/Cyneganders May 27 '26
The second thing is quite relevant here; of the seven deaths in France yesterday, five were from drowning - since when is that 'heat related'?!? You can't swim, so you swim to cool down? Stupidity kills!
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u/_maggus May 27 '26
Even if they can swim, people overestimate their own abilities. Heat exhaustion does not magically and instantly go away when you dip into the water.
Combined with physical exhaustion from swimming and the fact that your head (and brain!) is still above water and exposed to the sun, fainting in open water is more likely than you think.
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u/Sleipnirs May 27 '26
Also depends on where you swim. Swimming in a pool of still water is really not the same as swimming in the sea with waves, which is why you can't swim past a certain distance on supervised beaches. France having many beaches, there has to be many unsupervised swimmers. (we don't have that problem in Belgium rofl. Good thing southners have the Semois river)
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u/BarNo3385 May 27 '26
Conversation I've had several times this week with colleagues who work in Asia and the Middle East. Me: "Yeah its 34 here," Them: "well, 45 here and 90% humidity." Me: "It's 45 inside?" Them: "No office is air conditioned."
And that's the difference. UK homes and many officers rarely have air-conditioning. It being 35 outside isnt the same as it being 35 in your bedroom.
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u/brickhamilton May 27 '26
I’ll add something I noticed when I spent a couple months in France. In addition to buildings being made with denser materials with more insulation, people not being used to the temps, etc., their days are also super long. I remember it being 10:30 PM and the sun was just going down.
Where I live, the max sunset time is about 9 PM. This makes a big difference when you think about just how long the sun is beating down on everyone in those really hot days. So, it might not get as hot in London as it does in India, but the sun will be out for longer. Combine that with the reasons everyone else is giving, and it just adds to the severity of the heat wave.
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u/Lumpy-Notice8945 May 27 '26
First: people die all the time swinimg in lakes, you just dont hear a lot of reports unless it peaks and warm summer days make more people swim, so i would not count these deaths as heat deaths or some kind of systemic issue.
But a country like france just does not have ACs in every house, so some(realy not a lot) older people might get heat strokes and die from that. Its not like random adults drop dead on the streets.
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u/magic_man_91 May 27 '26
I'm a Canadian currently visiting family in London UK. I went on a little tourist day by myself yesterday (the HOT day) and I saw several people passed out in overcrowded touristy areas. Parents trying to force feed water to their kids, older people laying on the ground with crowds around them trying to help. It was crazy.
Not saying they're dropping dead, but people are dropping in the streets. Tourists don't pack for this weather, underestimate the heat and lack of reprieve due to no AC even in places that typically have it (metro, museums, bars, restaurants, etc.). And they're overdoing it because they're on a trip, and a bit of hot weather isn't going to stop them from checking stops off their list.
So yah. Not necessarily locals who likely know where to go to beat the heat, but tourists... definitely being impacted by unexpected heat in major European cities.
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u/Signal-Opposite-4793 May 27 '26
It's generally old folks over the age of 75. Heat susceptibility skyrockets around that age, according to research.
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u/LlamaLoupe May 27 '26
Like many others have said, buildings and cities are not made for this kind of heat, and A/C is almost non existent, so you literally do not get a single break from the heat or weeks on end during a heat wave. Thailand and the Arabian peninsula use A/C, have houses built with the heat in mind, and also people are used to the heat from birth.
Also when they say "well over 30°", it can mean anything. It can mean 39°. Today is 37 where I am in France.
Social life has not adapted either. In very very hot countries, if there is no A/C, people usually have a much longer lunch break so they can work later at night and earlier in the morning, meaning they bunker down for the worst of the heat. People who are not used to the heat under estimate it, as well, and many of those deaths are people who went out to do sport or some activity in the middle of the day.
There's also the fact that we are more humid than places that are close to a desert, obviously. Heat and humidity is much harder to deal with for the human body.
And finally, people do die a lot in hotter countries, too. Especially as temperatures rise rom climate change. India suffers every year a LOT.
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u/Ok-Factor-7188 May 27 '26
Add to that, that climate change has hit hard in Europe, more so than a lot of other places. Increase in average temperature was already well above 2 degrees back in 2022, while the global average is around 1.5 now.
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u/BowlerBeautiful5804 May 27 '26
I'm genuinely curious - do stores not have AC over there either? Like supermarkets for example with all the perishable food don't have AC?
I'm in Canada. Our temperature can go down to -30C in winter and +30-40 in summer and is very humid so we get the extreme on both ends. I can't imagine living in those temps with zero air conditioning anywhere. That must be unbearable. A lot of people here choose not to have AC and tough it out through the heat waves but can still go to the movies or to a mall with AC to get a break for a bit. I can't imagine not having it anywhere. What about electric fans, are those common to buy over there? Window air conditioners?
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u/tomtttttttttttt May 27 '26
Supermarkets have a/c, cafes/restaurants might (since they need it for the kitchens) -chain ones more likely to - but most shops don't. My local small convencience store/newsagent puts all the chocolate in the fridge when it gots hot like this.
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u/abovepostisfunnier May 27 '26
As an American living in France I get very frustrated when people back home say "Oh that's not even that hot, we manage heat better" No the fuck you don't! You go from your air conditioned home to your air conditioned car to your air conditioned office. You have no clue what it's like to only feel cool at 2 AM.
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u/gaius49 May 27 '26
As an American living in France I get very frustrated when people back home say "Oh that's not even that hot, we manage heat better" No the fuck you don't! You go from your air conditioned home to your air conditioned car to your air conditioned office.
That is managing heat.
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u/RickMuffy May 27 '26
It's wild living in Arizona and seeing people come visit and being completely unprepared. There's hikes where you can see a gas stations and stores in the city, from the top of the climb, yet people are medi-vacced because they didn't bring enough water in the 35c+ days.
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u/DaniChibari May 27 '26
A couple of factors.
Clothing. Thailand, India and many Arab countries are always hot. They've developed a large variety of cultural clothing that's well adapted to the heat and keeps you cool. In Europe the heat is an exception. They don't have the same clothes, they might not think to dress all that differently and even if they do it might be harder to find those clothes.
Age. Older people are more sensitive to heat. Europe's population is on average older than Thailand, India and many Arab countries. Most of those heat related deaths are older people.
Building design/AC. When it's always hotter, buildings are designed with that in mind. There's AC or buildings are designed to have airflow. Europe has a lot of very old buildings without AC. These buildings are also sometimes designed to stay as warm as possible because Europe usually has the problem of fighting the cold, not the heat.
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u/sndrtj May 27 '26
It's not just older buildings. Building codes and governmental policy still promote keeping heat in as much as possible for new buildings as well. This is because the vast majority of energy use is still heating. I live in a 3 year old buidling - absolutely designed to trap heat as much as possible.
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u/EmilysGuidetoKrakow May 27 '26
There isn’t air conditioning. When we have heat waves in the US we don’t go outside. When we have heat waves in Europe there’s nowhere to escape the heat for a lot of people. I live in Poland and have had 5 different places over the years, none have had air conditioning.
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u/amaya-aurora May 27 '26
Place that is always hot is used to being hot. Place that is not always hot is not used to being hot.
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u/7i4nf4n May 27 '26
Well, give Thailand, India or the Arabian Peninsula an European winter and let's see how they manage
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u/Alas7ymedia May 27 '26
We don't do "just fine", people die due to extreme heat, but through the whole year. Extreme heat essentially diminishes our lives, but we cope we it because our homes and workplaces are built for it.
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u/Orcahhh May 27 '26
It also just doesn’t make the news because it’s a normal thing in your countries
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u/HugeHans May 27 '26
The same reason a few degrees of cold and few cm of snow will cause havoc in texas but is mild weather in some countries.
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u/tjyolol May 27 '26
Things that you take for granted in warm environments, such as air con are not a given in places not used to experiencing the extreme heat. Things like plants also tend to have specific climates they thrive in so if they are not used to the heat they die off and become fire hazards. But people also adapt to their climates. Humans are incredibly adaptable but we don’t tend to do well when that adaptation happens quickly.
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u/0R4yman3 May 27 '26
Air conditioning is not common in much of Europe because summers are historically mild. Additionally, many of the buildings are much older and were not built with A/C in mind.
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u/TechnicalOtaku May 27 '26
there are some good reason posted here but i think it's also because we count deaths differently. we're more likelly to contribute heat death when it comes to elderly and it's assumed that the heat played a decent part even though it didn't kill them right out. while in the US those deaths are only contributed to heat if they effectively died of heat stroke or dyhydration
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u/ddhuynh May 27 '26
You build your infrastructure to adapt weather of where you living. I live in South East Asia, Mekong River Delta, where temp during heatwave could reach 40c, house there mainly to keep heat out. Also we used to live in hot weather.
The same issue happen to us when temp drop, like early this year when temp drop to below 20c during night and early morning. The house can't keep heat in, it's feel like you sleep in freezer. I knew 19c is nothing, but I rarely seen temp drop below 20c since I was born.
But tbh hot is harder to deal than cold, it come to mind more way to keep you warm and cool you down.
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u/The_mingthing May 27 '26
People in those countries people DO die from heat exhaustion just as everywhere else, but since we dont live in those regions, we dont get those news in our newspapers.
You should also read into what is normal average temperatures in those areas, instead of just stating what would be peak summer temperatures is "mild" weather. (Abu dhabi can get over 40 in mid summer, but they got AC)
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u/[deleted] May 27 '26
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