How much of Europe's city heat death toll is down to climate change?

More than 50,000 people died from heat in towns and cities across thirty European countries this summer, according to two new studies in Nature Health. The figures are statistical estimates built from temperature records, not official death reports. The areas studied hold about forty percent of those countries' people.

Researchers link 65 percent of those deaths to climate change, up from forty percent at the start of the century.

This summer's total, 50,391, is about double last summer's 24,572, and the chart sets it against the earlier high summers since the turn of the century, in the urban areas studied.

Clair Barnes, who leads both studies, said: “But that mortality has been pushed substantially higher by the human-caused warming, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.”