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EXTREME HEAT ACROSS southern European countries will continue today, with red alerts issued for cities across the region due to dangerously high temperatures.
A ‘heat dome’ – an intense and stable area of high pressure trapping hot air and bringing cloudless conditions – will see temperatures climb further today in France. Italy’s heatwave is set to continue for the rest of the week.
Paul Moore, a climatologist at Met Éireann, said human-caused climate change is at play “making these high pressure systems last longer and be more intense”.
Eimear Moffat from Dublin is holidaying with her two teenagers in Portugal’s Algarve, where temperatures have hit the high 30s.
“There’s no relief from it,” Moffat said.
“Even with the air conditioning on full blast, it’s like the heat is seeping in from everywhere.”
Moffat and her family have been visiting the area for 30 years and have never experienced heat like that of recent days before.
“I can’t imagine how tough it must be for people who live here and have to live out ordinary days, going to work,” she said.
Majella Finn from Co Kilkenny drove to Asturias in northern Spain yesterday from the Basque city of Hondaribbia, near the border with France. Temperatures there were about 10 degrees above normal levels for the time of year.
It was so hot, Finn and her husband couldn’t leave their air-conditioned hotel bedroom until nightfall.
“It was 33 degrees and I couldn’t step outside the front door of the hotel. The humidity was extremely high,” Finn said.
They watched Sunday’s GAA fixtures in their room – and ran down to their hotel’s pool at half-time to jump in the water.
April Murphy, owner of Murph’s Irish bar in Marbella, said “relentless” hot weather since late April is almost certainly contributing to a dip in international tourism this season – although anti-tourism protests and April’s power blackout could also be factors, as could higher accommodation prices.
“Even people with holiday homes here are saying it’s too hot and staying away,” Murphy said.
“I have friends who look after Airbnbs and they say they’re still not full, there are still empty weeks.”
Clare Dunne, CEO of the Irish Travel Agents Association, said most people who choose to travel at this time of year braced for high temperatures. She noted a recent trend for more Irish tourists to travel to hot countries in April, May, September and October.
Finn, on holidays in northern Spain, said she preferred to travel in June, when temperatures are normally not this high.
“The thing was, we were in a beautiful city in Hondaribbia, and we were limited in what we could do,” she said.
“There was no way we could walk around in that heat, so we were forced inside. If it had been 23 degrees, we would have been able to spend five more hours outside.”
Brendan Martin owns The Merchant Irish bar in Seville, one of Spain’s hottest cities, where a temperature of 42 degrees was reached yesterday – with the same high levels expected again today.
Hot weather is not unusual in Seville, but this heatwave is “a little bit early”, said Martin, who has lived in Seville for 30 years.
It’s already the second heatwave of the year “and there’ll probably be a couple more”, he added.
So how are his Irish customers faring?
“I would say most Irish people have never experienced heat like this. They suffer. There’s a way to do it – you try and get everything done in the morning and spend the afternoon indoors. They [Irish tourists] tend not to listen to you,” he said.
Martin said the average person in Seville is “extremely aware of climate change” and there is a culture of conserving both water and electricity.
The inland city’s extremely hot summers mean July and August are traditionally a quiet period. He will close his bar midweek in July, as Seville residents head for cooler areas near the coast.
UN secretary general António Guterres, visiting Seville yesterday, said extreme heat was becoming a “new normal”.
“The planet is getting hotter and more dangerous — no country is immune,” Guterres said.
Moore, of Met Éireann noted that Spain and Portugal saw record high temperatures for June at the weekend, while in France temperatures have surpassed 40 degrees. Wildfires raged in Turkey yesterday, while extreme temperature warnings were in place in Montenegro and much of Croatia.
Even southern England looked set to breach its June record temperature yesterday, Moore said.
“We’re seeing the jet stream in summer weaker and more meridional, so these high pressure systems get stuck in the same place for longer, and recent research has linked that to the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the world,” Moore said.
“Human-caused climate change is the main driver of this.”
Additional reporting by Laura Byrne.
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