As the world heats up, will climate action, too?

The Northern Hemisphere is hot this week. Very hot. 

In London, temperatures climbed above 104 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history. It was enough to melt the runway at a British air force base.

In southwestern France, wildfires fueled by the hot, dry weather burned through pine forests and forced the evacuation of some 14,000 residents. In Portugal, temperatures reached 117 F, and the Portuguese health ministry reported that this heat was responsible for some 700 deaths. Hundreds of people died in Spain’s heat wave, as well, according to officials there. 

In the U.S., residents across the Great Plains braced for what meteorologists were predicting could be the hottest days anyone has ever experienced there, while in China, officials warned that temperatures of up to 107 F could last for 40 days in the southern part of the country.

All of this prompted United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to urge more concrete action on climate change, saying to international leaders in Berlin this week that the world could either take “collective action or collective suicide.”

For many climate advocates – and many in the general public – the widespread heat wave has been yet another reminder of how governments have failed to address climate change or move away from fossil fuels, a grim harbinger of a global warming future. Scientists are unequivocal in saying that climate change has made heat waves like this one much more likely, and hotter, in a way they say will increase as long as greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere keep rising.

But some also see a kernel of hope in the blistering heat. Among all extreme weather events, heat waves are the ones most likely to push people toward climate action, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and other researchers.

“With heat, the range and scope is so significant,” says Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who directs the school’s Institute of Public Opinion. “Its ability to remind folks of the underlying issue is pretty key.”

That doesn’t mean climate change rises to the top of the policy priority list, Dr. Borick cautions. Indeed, when it comes to what academics call “relative saliency” – or the perceived importance of one issue compared to others – climate still falls short in both the U.S. and Europe, regardless of extreme weather events over past years, and despite a growing public consensus about the science of global warming.

“We have multiple crises and challenges that are significant to people and politicians at the same time,” says Annika Hedberg, head of the sustainable prosperity for Europe program at European Policy Centre, an independent think tank based in Brussels. “The Russian war in Ukraine, and the fact that Russia is weaponizing food and energy … we are looking at populations facing cost-of-living crises. There are these pressures on people’s minds.”

In the U.S., that list of other challenges includes inflation, gun violence, and sharp partisan divisions. But as political maneuvering even this week shows, there is at least some growing pressure for lawmakers to respond to three-digit temperatures. Democrats have started pressuring President Joe Biden to declare a “national climate emergency.”

Climate experts are quick to point out that the Global North is not the first part of the world to feel the heat – or other impacts – of climate change. This spring, a weekslong heat wave in India and Pakistan sent temperatures soaring to 115 F, making for the hottest March ever recorded there. Meanwhile, power shortages left swaths of the country without air conditioning.

“Europe on a global scale is much richer than most other regions of the world. And so we have the means to protect ourselves more,” says Stephen Fisher, a professor of political sociology at Oxford University. “So you wouldn’t say that Europeans of whatever age are particularly vulnerable. You would say that people in sub-Saharan Africa [and] large parts of Asia are particularly vulnerable.”

In Europe, where climate change has triggered protest movements and boosted the fortunes of Green parties, climate change is widely seen as a priority concern. In Italy, the collapse of an Alpine glacier killed 11 people early this month, and rivers like the Po are running low; water rationing measures are the new summer norm. The heat wave has also exacerbated projected drought-related losses for farmers, particularly in southern Europe.

Temperatures were so intense by United Kingdom standards on Tuesday that Edward Gryspeerdt covered the windows of his home in London with aluminum foil and reflective blankets. Homes in Britain are ill-equipped to cope with heat waves, he notes, tending to boast large windows to let the sun in during cold winters and lacking shutters prevalent in warmer parts of Europe. 

“It is more extreme than any heat wave we’ve had in the past,” says Dr. Gryspeerdt, a research fellow at the Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London. “A lot of the things in the U.K. are just not designed for high temperatures. So for example, the railway station near where I live has pretty much no trains running out of it today. One of the airports closed yesterday because the runway had melted.”

The country’s hottest day on record also sparked fires in and around London. 

If the intensity of the heat wave has captured attention, so has the breadth of it. 

While it is not unusual for the Northern Hemisphere to experience its top temperatures in the summer months, says Rachel Licker, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the U.S., it’s not typical for so many different areas to have extreme heat at once.

“What’s really striking is how many places are setting records around the Northern Hemisphere at the same time,” she says.

Still, Dr. Fisher says there is mixed evidence on whether heat waves create a greater sense of urgency around climate action. Already, most surveys in northern European countries, particularly Scandinavian ones, report high levels of concern about climate change and enthusiasm for climate action. It’s a mixed story in Southern Europe. Italy, Spain, and Portugal all report very high levels of climate concern, less so Greece and others. There is also widespread skepticism over whether governments can deliver on their net-zero greenhouse emission goals by 2050 amid disagreements on how to get there. Those debates are now heightened by anxieties over how the war in Ukraine has affected energy prices.

“A lot of people in Europe are very well aware of climate change and have been aware of it for a long time and have had a settled view,” he says. “So it doesn’t change too much when extreme weather events come along.” 

The awareness of climate change in the U.S., meanwhile, has grown significantly. As of last year, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 71% of Americans believed climate change was happening; other polls find that number to be even higher.

“When it comes to accepting the reality of climate change, Americans are in a new place,” says Dr. Borick. “Most Americans now agree it’s a reality. What isn’t as clear is: Have these beliefs and experiences changed the priorities for Americans?”

Only 42% of Americans say that “dealing with climate change” should be a top concern for lawmakers, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. That ranks lower than strengthening the economy, reducing health care costs, improving education, and dealing with immigration, among other issues.

But at the same time, Pew researchers have also found that 65% of Americans – an overwhelming majority of Democrats and more than half of Republicans – believe the government should be doing more to address climate change. 

Meanwhile, researchers say the hot days will just get hotter – and more frequent - as long as the world continues to send heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

At the end of a full day of gardening in Italy’s heat-stricken town of Piacenza, Angela Acerbi says she is exhausted. “It’s too hot,” she says, noting that temperatures feel even higher out in the sun and that she lacks water to do her work.

Climate change, to her, is an obvious reality. The heat wave is just one reminder. 

“Before, you had spring and you worked in a T-shirt,” she says. “Then summer would come and you’d switch to a tank top. Then a shirt in the fall. Instead now you go from cold. There are no in-between seasons.”

Editor’s note: The timing of a glacier collapse mentioned in this article has been corrected; it occurred early in July.