Imagine Paris at 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius. The asphalt streets would melt in spots, making it virtually impossible for ambulances and buses to pass. The lights and fans could cut out in neighborhoods if underground cables burned or junction boxes shifted. Cellphone service might go down as antennas on boiling rooftops stopped working. Trains would halt as outdoor rails swelled, keeping nurses, firefighters and electricity engineers from reaching their jobs when they were most needed, reports The New York Times.
Those are situations city officials are already planning for.
“A heat wave at 50 degrees is not a scenario of science fiction,” said Pénélope Komitès, a deputy mayor who oversaw a crisis simulation two years ago based on those presumptions. “It’s a possibility we need to prepare for.”
France has recently experienced its second heat wave of the summer, with temperatures reaching record highs last week in the southwest and heat alerts covering three-quarters of the country. In Paris, this has become the new normal. Eight of the 10 hottest summers recorded in the city since 1900 occurred since 2015.
In 2019, temperatures in Paris hit a record, nearing 109 degrees. Scientists say it will get worse, particularly since climate change is warming Europe at more than twice the global average.
In 2022, city officials asked climate scientists if Paris might experience heat waves that reach 50 degrees in the near future.
Their answer was yes, possibly, by the end of the century, or as soon as around 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions increase exponentially. But the scientists’ modeling showed that scenario was unlikely if global pledges from the Paris climate accord were met and the rise in warming was kept below 2 degrees Celsius.
“I don’t think we should bet on that as a society,” said Alexandre Florentin, a green city councilor and environmental engineer who spent more than a decade working at Carbone 4, a leading French climate change mitigation and adaptation firm.
He led a committee of city lawmakers, from all political parties, to examine the capital’s vulnerabilities to extreme heat waves. They published their report, Paris at 50°C, in 2023, separately from the crisis simulation.
They found that there were temperature thresholds that could cause widespread breakdowns, leading to a cascade of crippling domino effects.
Read more of this report from The New York Times.