French Bakeries & Climate Change

The climate news is… bad. Very bad. As in: it looks like summer months in some heavily populated places are quickly approaching medically unsurvivable levels.

Another Sort of French Bakery

I love French bakeries. Whether boulangeries or pâtisseries, there is a delicious experience in the offing, as well as pleasant exchange with the proprietors and a cultural lesson.

However, today’s post on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) is about a French bakery of an altogether different sort: Europe in the grips of climate change.

This plot made the rounds on social media a couple days ago. It shows the temperature on 2026-Jun-21, the summer solstice, expressed as a deviation from average. A heat dome (a high-pressure region that is confining a mass of hot air, both by pressure and convective means) is burning western Europe.

That’s… really bad.

However, this chart has a number of problems:

• I couldn’t find any citation for it, and an image search just pointed back at the poster. (In this age of rampant ens**ttification of everything, including search, that’s regrettably not unusual.)
• Most people won’t be able to interpret the deviation from mean, other than “kind of hotter than normal”. (Also, Americans are illiterate in Celsius temperatures, but that’s another issue.)
• Aggravatingly, it also commits several chartcrimes. Most blatant is the color scheme: the color scale at the bottom uses white, or near-white, to encode 3 different things. Just by looking at a white(-ish) area on the map you can’t tell which, unless you look at the surrounding colors and invoke continuity to guide your guess.

Still, the chart showed us something important, albeit in an obscure way.

Here’s a map from just 2 days later, showing the temperature in Celsius. ^[1] For American readers, should any be so rash as to read this CLBTNR, I remind you of a few basic facts of arithmetic:

• 35°C =   95°F,
• 40°C = 104°F, and
• 45°C = 113°F.

Now look at the numbers on the map, and marvel at how hot it is, particularly compared to the average (previous chart).

This is a continent where air conditioning, now common in the US, is quite rare. It is very, very difficult to retrofit buildings for AC when those buildings are often a century old and have windows never designed for such a thing. You simply cannot say “Well, they should buy air conditioners” without sounding like an utter idiot. Indeed, as Charles Stross has pointed out from time to time, buildings in Scotland are designed to retain heat for better winter comfort; in summer that leads to the deadly result that inside is hotter than outside!

Europe is also a place where summer humidity can be quite high. That makes sweating ineffective at dumping heat – more below – and thus potentially deadly.
Scientists have a way of measuring that, with what’s called a “wet bulb” thermometer:

• One thermometer is just the usual thing, with the bulb exposed to the air.
• Another thermometer has the bulb covered in a wet cloth.
  • If humidity is low enough to allow evaporative cooling, then the wet bulb will show a lower temperature.
  • However, if humidity is high, that inhibits evaporation. At 100% relative humidity, the air contains all the moisture it can absorb from any source, including the wet bulb and including a sweating person. So the wet bulb will indicate nearly the same temperature as the dry bulb.

When that happens, sweating no longer works. If the ambient temperature is above human the body temperature 37°C = 98.6°F, then you will absorb heat from the environment with no way to cool down. First heat exhaustion, then heat shock, then coma (if you’re lucky, since the imminent death is highly unpleasant).

There have been some very sobering mathematical and experimental research papers lately – guess why! – on what combinations of heat and humidity are survivable for humans. One such ^[2], shows us in their Figure 6 the curve beyond which human survival is measured in minutes:

• The left plot is for men, and the right plot is for women. Though, honestly, there isn’t that much difference, at least to my suspicious eye?
• The horizontal axis is temperature in Celsius, and the vertical axis is relative humidity in %.
• The pink zone to the upper right is labelled the “Unsurvivable Zone”. A human here, without life support equipment, will quickly die. Even with life support equipment, consider: air conditioning dumps the heat outside, which does not improve matters overall!

The temperature in eastern France, say around Nantes, Tours, Le Mans (my PhD thesis advisor was from Le Mans), is 40°C – 43°C. It is hotter than the Sahara desert, but of course much more humid than a desert! The chart above tells us that relative humidity cannot be above 60% and be compatible with human survival; we should expect death reports from western Europe because of climate change in a couple days.

To be sure, there are worse situations of heat and humidity, but not many.

A famous one is the Naica Crystal Cave, in Mexico. ^[3] Obviously, it’s quite a beautiful thing, with giant selenite crystals (basically hydrated calcium sulfate). But you don’t want to go there, since the survival time for a human without life support equipment is about 10 minutes. Despite no bodies of water being present, you will drown:

• The temperature can be as high as 58°C = 136°F. That’s obviously a problem, right there.
• The humidity is around 90% – 99%. Obviously another problem, but…

That’s firmly in the “Unsurvivable Zone”. Yes, it could kill you via heat shock, but mostly you’re gonna drown: your lungs are quite cool compared to the cave air, so the humidity condenses in your lungs, which then fill with hot water. Nothing good comes of a lungful of water, whatever the temperature.

Using refrigerated suits containing large ice packs and cold breathing gear can extend your survival time… to about 30 minutes.

Clearly a place for robotic exploration, not tourism!

One interesting, or at least darkly amusing, comparison I saw was that Europeans are starting to die of heat from climate change at about the same rate Americans are dying of gunfire. In words usually attributed to HL Mencken, “Interesting, if true.”

There were a number of issues, but fortunately one has the help of Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher at Oxford, writing at By the Numbers ^[4] to help sort it all out for us:

• The original measures excess heat deaths over normal in Europe (to capture things like heat aggravation of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and so on), but just deaths in the US.
• The deaths in the US had to have something like “heat” on the death certificate, leading to a severe undercount.
• Defining what “Europe” or “the European Union” means is… complicated.

So she made a plot based on excess deaths over normal in both places, and did per capita normalization to account for the population difference (the US is somewhat larger, though not dramatically).

Ritchie sums it up nicely (emphasis added):

As I mentioned, I found the initial framing of guns and heat as a contest to be a bit silly — they’re not substitutes. Europe is doing a bad job of protecting itself from life-threatening heat. That the US has disproportionately high rates of gun deaths compared to other rich countries is also bad. The two are not mutually exclusive.

But it does highlight something important about status quo bias. Both places take the status quo as a given: a high-mortality situation in one domain that they’d never accept in another.

Yes, it is insane to tolerate this death rate, from either guns or heat. Americans could do something about gun deaths, by gun controls like every other developed nation. Europeans face climate changes that will require global action, which the obscenely wealthy fossil fuel incumbents are determined to block.

What Are We Doing About It?

There is no doubt that Trump is actively hostile to any sort of green energy project or limitation on fossil fuel oligarchs.

He has not just stopped leasing for offshore wind farms. He has not just removed every tax incentive he can, such as the ones that made solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps more affordable here at Château Weekend.

He has, in fact, gone further: buying back existing offshore wind farm leases, i.e., spending real taxpayer money to bribe companies to stop green energy. ^[5] With the latest deal, it appears that he has spent approximately \$2.5 billion to force the abandonment of wind energy projects! (In defense of the companies taking the bribe: they had little chance of moving forward under Trump, who has refused all green energy permitting. So they’re bailing out of a hopeless situation not (only) because of greed, but because Trump has made things impossible.)

Infuriatingly, Invenergy has said it will take the money and put it toward 5 new natural gas electrical plants! Similar agreements with TotalEnergies and others have diverted green energy money to fossil fuel plants.

They’re even making up a completely bogus story about wind turbines on land interfering with military radars and thus constitute a threat should the US face air invasions. Similar administration statements about “unreliability” of green energy plants just repeat the lies of the fossil fuel incumbents.

So this is what we’re doing: we’re bribing companies out of green energy and forcing them into dirty fossil fuel energy… while Europe burns.

It is now more expensive to try to stop green energy than it is to just let it peacefully and profitably happen.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke at the London Climate Action Week meeting a couple days ago. ^[6] Illustrating how much the entire rest of the world is against Trump’s strategy above, among many other things he noted the gargantuan windfall profits of fossil fuel companies, and called for taxing the fossil fuel companies while economically subsidizing a green transition as fast as possible:

The eight largest fossil fuel companies reported pocketing an extra $6.5 billion in the first quarter of this year alone – and that only includes one month of the Middle East crisis, as oil prices continued to climb and profits to rise.

These are windfall gains born of pain – of instability, hardship and dependence.

I urge governments to tax them.

And I urge them to use the proceeds where they belong: helping vulnerable families and communities, and accelerating the shift to clean, affordable energy.

But removing harmful subsidies and incentives is not enough. We must also remove the structural barriers holding back clean energy projects.

He’s making sense. I have deep doubts the US will be able to understand that as long as we are in the grip of Republicans.

Perhaps there will be good news at the midterms this fall? Enough to impeach/convict/remove as many Trump officials as possible, followed by criminal indictments/convictions/imprisonments. Anything less will just convince the next psychopath that Trump got away with it, so why not try the same thing all over again?

The Weekend Conclusion

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I observed the vaccine disinformation and hysteria from conservatives, and wondered if we had a near-species-wide death wish.

Not much since then has persuaded me to change my mind.

It really looks like right-wingers, particularly in the US, will cling to their beliefs until they’re dead. Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of us around the planet will also die for their beliefs.

Honestly, I dunno what to do about it.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

1: M Korosec, “Europe’s Excessive Heat Warning: Record June Heat Dome Spikes France to 45°C, UK Eyes 40°C”, Severe Weather EU web site, 2026-Jun-22. ↩

2: F Wang, et al., “Mapping Human Survivability at Extreme Wet-Bulb Temperatures 32–35°C”, bioRχiv, 2025-Sep-30. DOI: 10.1101/2025.09.22.677706. NB: Not (yet) peer reviewed. ↩

3: Wikipedia Editors, “Cave of the Crystals”, Wikipedia, downloaded 2026-Jun-24. ↩

4: H Ritchie, “Do more Europeans die of summer heat than Americans die of guns?”, By the Numbers blog, 2026-May-28. ↩

5: B Plumer, “Trump Administration to Pay $765 Million to Cancel 4 More Wind Projects”, New York Times, 2026-Jun-17. ↩

6: António Guterres, “Secretary-General’s special address at London Climate Action Week”, UN FCC Secretariat (aka UN Climate Change) web site, 2026-Jun-23. ↩