Central Europe Heatwave Breaks Temperature Records — SkimNews
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- Slovakia's hydrometeorological agency confirmed a record 42C (108F) at Dolné Plachtince on Thursday, with Austria hitting 41.2C the previous day.
- Poland shut down the Kozienice and Połaniec coal-fired power plants after the Vistula River dropped too low to supply cooling water, removing 1.3GW of capacity hours after PM Donald Tusk urged employers to provide air conditioning for staff.
- Germany's Robert Koch Institute estimated 11,900 people have died from heat this summer, prompting Fridays for Future Berlin to demonstrate outside the chancellery and demand an end to fossil fuels.
- Hungary's PM Péter Magyar said a turbine at the Paks nuclear power plant resumed operation as the Danube rose nine centimeters above its Sunday low, while still calling for voluntary electricity reductions.
- Czechia's fire weather severity is over 50% worse than the previous record for this time of year, with Austria more than twice the prior mark and Slovakia 32% worse, per the European Forest Fire Information System.
- The EU has seen about half a million hectares burn since the start of the year, mostly in Spain and France, with an additional 292,000 hectares burned in Ukraine.
- The World Weather Attribution consortium found global heating made last month's hot, dry, windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France.
Why it matters: Poland's 1.3GW coal-plant outage shows fossil-fuel infrastructure is breaking under the heat it helped create. Germany's 11,900 estimated heat deaths this summer and World Weather Attribution's attribution of the conditions to global heating put a hard number on the cost of continuing fossil fuel dependency.
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