Paris saw a record high temperature of 42.6C (108.7F) on Thursday, amid a heatwave that broke records across Western Europe.
A red alert – the highest level – was issued in northern France.
Meanwhile Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands also reached new record highs, of 41.8C, 41.5C, 40.8C and 40.7C respectively.
The UK recorded a record temperature for July of 38.1C, with trains told to run more slowly to stop rails buckling.
Weather, of course, is not climate. But it’s hard not to imagine global warming has something to do with it, and quite frankly this terrifies me. Paris is far north of New Jersey. A few weeks ago, a few days in the high 90s in the northeastern USA was a major news story. 109 degrees in New Jersey is unimaginable. And it’s inevitable.
Writers Without Money 
Stan,
I like to read woo-woo books, one series of which is channeled information through medium Jane Roberts by an entity who called himself Seth. The books are highly readable and essentially affirm some of my own beliefs, but they also read like science fiction because others of the ideas are so outlandish.
Seth claims, among other things, that human thought creates the weather, which is the exteriorization of mass consciousness. The book series stopped with Jane Roberts’ death in 1984, so I can’t speak to climate change, but the symbolic link between physical climate and psychological climate is noteworthy. Is it possible that the emotional climate on the planet is reflected in the weather?
Other psychics speak along similar themes. Edgar Cayce claimed “Mind is the builder,” for instance.
The book I immediately thought about after reading about the horrific Paris heatwave was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. There’s an incredible passage where he laments being poor in the Parisian winter because Paris is such a far northern city.
To give you an idea of just how far to the north Paris is here it is compared with some Northern American cities.
Paris: 48.8566° N, 2.3522° E
Seattle: 47.6062° N, 122.3321° W
Portland Maine: 43.6591° N, 70.2568° W
Burlington Vermont: 44.4759° N, 73.2121° W
There’s no American city in the lower 48 north of Paris. Thus it was disturbing to be reading about Dubai/Riyadh weather north of Burlington Vermont. That feels apocalyptic.
It seems I read long ago that Europe has a milder climate than would be expected for its latitude because of the Gulf Stream, that carries warm currents (and air) from the Caribbean. Most of Europe lies north of the US lower 48, but for Spain and Italy.
France is a very large country with several types of climate zones. I believe Paris would be in a “Marine West Coast” climate, similar to the Pacific Northwest. It’s not supposed to get extremely hot.