Meanwhile, in the UK and other typically temperate parts of Europe, even being inside your own home might not be enough to escape dangerously high temperatures. Homes in these regions are designed to keep the heat in during winter and don’t come with air conditioning. In the UK, a fifth of all homes are said to overheat in the summer, meaning indoor temperatures exceed 28 degrees C (82.4 degrees F) more than 1% of the time the space is occupied, or 26 degrees C (78.8 degrees F) in bedrooms.

Europe’s heat wave is making its energy crisis even more critical. As households and businesses turn on their air conditioners, electricity demand has jumped and wholesale power prices have surged. But what’s worse than the heat wave is the little-discussed drought spreading from Germany to Portugal. Javier Blas explains that the lack of rain is making Europe even more reliant on Russian gas by reducing hydropower generation, interrupting the flow of fuel along the Rhine to Germany’s coal-fired power stations and making it harder to cool nuclear plants.