Europe's Heat Deaths Top 33,000 as Political Blame Intensifies

Since then, political attention has shifted to wars, inflation and other concerns. In Linz, the mayor’s office downgraded a prominent climate coordination position and removed the word “climate” from the department responsible for resilience. Conservative and far-right populist politicians have complained that newly greened areas took away road and parking spaces, hinting they could tear them out, Schobesberger said. The city approved a highway corridor that will raise temperatures, over Green Party objections. Hundreds of trees have been cut down for asphalt and cars.

On the national level, the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) runs an ongoing campaign to confuse the public about the causes of the climate crisis and to block the shift to renewable energy, especially wind power, she said.

Reinhard Steurer, a professor of climate politics at Vienna’s BOKU University, said he saw the far-right weaponize the heat firsthand. During the June heat surge, producers with ServusTV, an Austrian media company aligned with right-wing populist parties, asked him via email to appear on a news program and criticize the government for failing to adapt. Steurer said his first reaction was disbelief, because for years ServusTV denied human-caused global warming and downplayed its impacts, similar to Fox News in the United States. He described it as a broader political strategy: acknowledge the suffering caused by extreme heat while shifting responsibility to the current government to gain political advantage. Instead of acknowledging that human-caused warming worsens wildfire conditions, the disinformation narrative shifts blame to migrant campfires, he added. ServusTV did not immediately respond to questions from Inside Climate News.

The politics of climate extremes do not have to follow that path, said Aaron Thierry, a researcher at Cardiff University in Wales. He pointed to Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who is using the worsening disasters to argue for action. Sánchez has spoken bluntly about the connection between extreme weather and global warming. As wildfires swept across Spain this summer, he called the climate emergency a threat to lives and ecosystems and said governments need to address both causes and consequences.

It is too early to measure the effect of this summer’s extremes, Thierry said. Overall public and media climate discourse is still way off target, he added, citing several recent studies showing a sharp decline in climate coverage in recent years. That decline takes pressure off governments to act.

“It feels like the climate issue is actually getting less attention and I find that deeply concerning,” Thierry said. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that addressing the root causes is the only way to prevent mass casualties during even hotter summers projected for the decades ahead. The rising heat-related death tolls across Europe show that even wealthy, developed countries are reaching the limits of adaptation. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that we have to phase out fossil fuels because that’s ultimately what’s driving extreme heat,” he said. “The science is trying to tell us this is super-urgent. It’s transformational change that is needed, and our politics are not at that place yet.”