The Summer That Isn’t Behaving Like a Summer

I’m writing this from a cave in rural Spain, which sounds more romantic than it is when the thermometer’s doing things thermometers shouldn’t do in a country that’s meant to know how to handle heat. We’ve had centuries of practice here. Shutters closed by ten, siestas that aren’t laziness but survival strategy, stone walls that keep things cool the way modern glass boxes never will. And even with all that inherited wisdom, this summer has felt different. Heavier. Longer. The kind of heat that doesn’t lift in the evening the way it’s supposed to.

Turns out it isn’t just me being dramatic for the newsletter. It isn’t.

The numbers, stripped of the euphemisms

Let’s start with what’s actually been reported, because “unprecedented” gets thrown around so often now it’s lost its teeth. According to El País, June heat culminated in over 1,000 excess deaths in Spain, 623 of which came as a direct result of Europe’s June heatwave. Not a model. Not a projection. Bodies, counted, in the country I currently call home.

France fared no better. Temperatures there eclipsed worst-case forecasts that had been set for the year 2050, with a further 1,000 or more deaths attributed to extreme heat. Read that again. Not “close to” 2050 projections. Past them. We’ve apparently time-travelled straight through a quarter century of climate modelling in the space of one June, and nobody rang a bell to warn us.

And this is meant to be the opening act. The current El Niño phase, a warm period within a two to seven year climate cycle, is only just beginning. Which means what we’re currently burying people over isn’t the peak. It’s the warm-up act before the headline slot.

For context on what “peak” can actually look like: in 2022, the most recent banner year for European heatwaves, there were over 61,000 heat-related deaths across the continent, and that wasn’t even an El Niño year. Sit with that. A non-El Niño summer took 61,000 lives across Europe. We are now stacking an El Niño on top of a planet that’s already several degrees more agitated than the one that produced 2022. The maths here isn’t comforting.

El Niño isn’t the villain. It’s the accelerant.

I want to be honest about something, because I think honesty is the only thing worth writing if you’re going to write at all. El Niño isn’t new. It isn’t caused by us. It’s a naturally occurring oscillation in Pacific sea surface temperatures that’s been cycling for as long as there’s been a Pacific to cycle in. People were dealing with El Niño years long before anyone burned a barrel of oil.

But here’s the bit that gets quietly dropped from the conversation whenever someone wants to reassure you that this is all perfectly natural, nothing to see here: El Niño doesn’t operate in a vacuum any more. It operates on top of a baseline that keeps rising, year on year, because of what we’ve pumped into the atmosphere. Climate change doesn’t invent El Niño’s heat. It hands El Niño a bigger amplifier and turns the volume dial past where the manufacturer intended.

That’s the actual relationship, and it matters because it’s the difference between “this is just weather” and “this is weather plus a structural handicap we’ve built into the system ourselves.” Even the ocean’s surface waters are under unprecedented stress, with the average global ocean temperature breaking the all-time record high for the month of June. Warmer oceans feed warmer El Niños. Warmer El Niños feed worse heatwaves. It’s not one villain. It’s a feedback loop with several hands on the wheel, and we’ve been one of them for well over a century.

Why this isn’t just a Europe problem, or a “over there” problem

It’s tempting, when a headline says “Europe,” to file it under things happening to other people. Don’t. The heatwaves currently baking North America, South Asia, South America and Africa are certain to carry their own share of tragedy, and Europe simply happens to be where the early, well-documented body count has surfaced first, because European countries tend to publish excess mortality data faster and more transparently than most. The absence of a headline from your region isn’t the absence of risk. It’s often just the absence of a functioning reporting system.

What actually needs doing, without the doom-scroll paralysis

I’m not interested in writing something that leaves you more anxious and no better equipped, that’s a genre of journalism I find fairly cowardly, all alarm and no ladder down. So here’s the practical bit, the stuff that actually keeps people alive when the mercury refuses to behave.

Take the early warnings seriously, even when you feel fine. Heat deaths aren’t mostly dramatic collapses in the street. They’re quiet. Cardiovascular strain, kidney stress, dehydration that creeps up on people who assumed they were “fine” because they weren’t visibly struggling. The people most at risk, the elderly, the very young, anyone on certain medications, anyone living alone, often don’t feel unwell until they’re already in trouble.

Check on people. Actually check, not a text that goes unread. A huge proportion of heat deaths in past European heatwaves have been elderly people living alone, sometimes for days, before anyone noticed. If you have an older neighbour, a relative who lives solo, someone who doesn’t have air conditioning, that knock on the door matters more than any hashtag ever will.

Rethink your hours, not just your habits. This is what we do here in Spain, and it’s not charming folklore, it’s functional design. Outdoor activity before ten, after eight, shutters and blinds closed through the peak hours, water treated as a constant companion rather than an occasional afterthought. Air conditioning where you have it, cool damp cloths and cross-ventilation where you don’t.

Watch for the symptoms that matter. Heat exhaustion versus heatstroke isn’t a pedantic distinction, it’s the line between “lie down and rehydrate” and “call emergency services now.” Confusion, hot dry skin instead of sweating, a racing heartbeat, disorientation, these aren’t things to wait out. Heatstroke kills fast and it doesn’t negotiate.

Stop treating “it’s just a hot summer” as a complete sentence. That framing has done more damage than the heat itself in some respects, because it tells people this is ordinary weather requiring ordinary responses. It isn’t, and the death tolls above aren’t ordinary either.

The part I keep coming back to

I didn’t move to rural Spain because I had a taste for extremity. I moved here for the quiet, the community, the slower architecture of a life built around people rather than productivity. What’s unsettling is watching a place that has genuinely mastered the art of living with heat, over centuries, start to strain against something new. If Spain’s inherited wisdom is being tested this hard, it’s worth asking seriously what happens to the places that never needed that wisdom in the first place, and are about to need it very quickly indeed.

This isn’t a call to panic. It’s a call to stop treating the data as background noise. Thousands of people did not die quietly this June because summer got a bit warm. They died because we’ve built a hotter baseline, handed it to a naturally occurring cycle, and then largely carried on as though the two things had nothing to do with each other.

They do. And the autumn equinox, by all accounts, isn’t going to be the relief anyone’s hoping for.

Until Next Time