The temperature exceeded Tuesday the threshold of 40 ° C in the United Kingdom, a first in this country hit like the rest of Western Europe by a heat wave which causes devastating forest fires, especially in France.
This is the second intense heat phenomenon in barely a month in Europe. This multiplication is a direct consequence of the climate crisis according to scientists, with greenhouse gas emissions increasing in intensity, duration and frequency.
The mercury exceeded a level never reached in the United Kingdom with 40.2 ° C at 11:50 GMT at Heathrow airport in west London, announced the Met Office weather agency.
The previous historic temperature record dated from July 2019 with 38.7 degrees.
Transport Minister Grant Schapps stressed on the BBC that “no”, the country’s public transport dating back to Victorian times was not able to handle such heat.
“All trains are canceled due to the heat. I don’t understand. They have trains in Australia. which work. What’s the problem here?” asked Ashley Meeloo, a 62-year-old user in London.
A hundred firefighters were also at work to fight a fire ravaging a village east of London.
The government has been accused of taking the phenomenon lightly. Resigning Prime Minister Boris Johnson skipped an emergency meeting on the crisis on Sunday, preferring to attend a farewell party, and Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab told Britons to “enjoy the sun”.
Environmental activists from the group Extinction Rebellion smashed the windows of News UK, which publishes the tabloid The Sun in particular, on Tuesday morning to protest against the treatment of the heat wave in certain media.
“The Sun chose to feature images of women in bikinis, beaches and happy children with ice cream,” the group said. Another tabloid, the Daily Express, headlined Monday, “It’s not the end of the world, stay cool and carry on.”
Elsewhere in Europe, Belgium fears records, the thermometer can climb up to 40°C. Exceptionally, the major museums run by the federal state are accessible free of charge to those over 65 who can find something fresh there.
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Two nuclear reactors located near Antwerp had to reduce their production power by more than 50% in order to limit the temperature of the water discharged into the river.
In France, temperatures are expected to drop on the Atlantic coast on Tuesday after a complicated night in Gironde, in the south-west of the country, on the front of the two giant fires which have already ravaged more than 19,000 hectares of forest.
Faced with these gigantic fires, 37,000 people had to be evacuated in total in six days.
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On Monday, absolute heat records were broken in 64 municipalities, mainly along the Atlantic coast.
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“It was unfortunately something expected,” Matthieu Sorel, climatologist at Météo-France, told AFP. But even more than the number of broken records, “what is significant is the amplitude” of the gaps between the old and some of the new records.
In Spain, where the extreme heat wave has been raging for almost ten days, forest fires continued to rage on Tuesday, especially in the province of Zamora (northwest). According to the regional authorities, nearly 6,000 people had to be evacuated because of the flames which destroyed several thousand hectares of meadows and forests.
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A slight respite was announced on the temperature side by the national meteorological agency, while the mercury has happily exceeded 40°C in recent days.
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“Climate change kills people (…), but also our ecosystem, our biodiversity”, reacted Monday the president of the government Pedro Sanchez.
In Portugal, more than 1,400 firefighters continued to fight the fires Tuesday morning.
The two most worrying forest fires are in the far north of the country. One of them mobilized nearly 700 firefighters on Tuesday.
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A couple in their 70s were killed in the area on Monday as they tried to escape the flames.
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A further rise in temperatures is expected from Wednesday in the country.
All of Germany is also facing this heat wave, but in Lower Saxony (north-west), temperatures could reach 40°C on Tuesday and therefore approach the record of 41.2°C recorded in 2019, which could be beaten on Tuesday or Wednesday, according to meteorologists.