France recorded over 2,000 extra deaths during a record-breaking heatwave in late June. England and Wales have lost an estimated 2,700 people to heat since May. At least 44 Americans died over the Fourth of July weekend alone. And somewhere in the middle of the actual desert, a city figured out how to stop the killing. The rest of us are just watching.
The Numbers Are Not Abstract Anymore
Let's be precise about what's happening here, because vague gestures at "extreme weather" let people tune out. According to BBC News, France saw more than 2,000 deaths during a single late-June heatwave. Scientists estimated that England and Wales suffered more than 2,700 heat-related deaths across a series of heatwaves since May. Forty-four Americans died over a holiday weekend that's supposed to be about fireworks and potato salad.
This is not a future problem. This is not a projection on a graph. These are people who were alive at the start of summer and are not alive now, and the reason is that it got too hot and nobody helped them.
Jennifer Marlon, a Yale University researcher who studies extreme heat impacts, told the BBC something that should be plastered on billboards in every city hall in the country: "People don't realise this is not the same heat that we were experiencing 10 years ago, it is actually worse, because in many cases nighttime temperatures are not cooling off." Your body needs the night to recover from the day. When the night stops cooling down, your body never gets that reset. That's not an inconvenience. That's a kill mechanism.
Phoenix Did the Thing. It Actually Worked.
Here's where the story gets both hopeful and infuriating at the same time. Maricopa County, Arizona, which sits on top of some of the most brutal heat in the United States, has been quietly building a model for how to keep people from dying in the heat. And it's working.
Phoenix became the first city in the world to hire a dedicated heat officer, back in 2021. The county expanded access to cooling centres, in some cases keeping them open 24 hours a day. They built programs to repair or replace air conditioning units for low-income residents. They treated heat not as a natural disaster you just survive, but as a predictable, manageable public health crisis you plan for. As Maricopa County's chief medical officer Nicholas Staab told the BBC, they've had "the relative benefit of knowing that this is going to be a problem every year."
The results are real. BBC News reports that heat-related deaths in the county peaked at 645 in 2023 and dropped to 405 in 2025. That's 240 people who did not die. That's not a rounding error. That's a policy working.
Before You Get Too Comfortable
The decline is not locked in, and the BBC's reporting makes that clear. As of July 11 this year, Maricopa County had already recorded 23 confirmed heat-related deaths with 282 more under investigation. If those numbers hold, 2026 could outpace 2025. A program that works is not the same as a problem that's solved.
Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at the University of Arizona, told the BBC that the math only keeps working if you keep doing the work. The cooling centres, the AC repair programs, the coordination between agencies, all of it requires ongoing investment and political will. Two things that, if you've been paying attention to American governance lately, are not exactly in surplus.
So Why Isn't Everyone Doing This
That's the question that should be making you crazy right now. Phoenix cracked a version of this code. Marlon told the BBC flatly: "The world has a lot to learn from Maricopa County." Keith made the logic as simple as possible: "It's incredibly important to make someone responsible for heat because the problem is, if it's no one's responsibility, then no one will address it."
Appoint a heat officer. Open cooling centres. Fix people's air conditioning when they can't afford to. These are not moon-shot ideas. They are bureaucratic decisions that require budget allocations and political attention. The reason most cities aren't doing them is not that they're impossible. It's that nobody senior enough has decided it's their job to care.
The BBC's reporting also notes what experts want governments to understand: heat is not just a health crisis, it's an infrastructure and economic crisis. Roads buckle. Flights get cancelled. Worker productivity collapses. The cost of doing nothing is enormous, it just shows up in ways that are easier to blame on something else.
What's Coming Whether You're Ready or Not
The scientific baseline here is not in dispute, whatever certain political figures might prefer. The BBC reports that heatwaves have become more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting because of human-induced climate change. The world is already more than 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, and temperatures will continue rising even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios.
Keith did not sugarcoat what that means for the near term. "If people think it's bad now, it's going to be hotter, and it's going to be hotter longer," he told the BBC. "The records are going to be broken, you can almost guarantee, year after year across the world." He's also calling for a specific mental shift in how we plan: stop designing for the heat of the past and start designing for the heat of the next decade. Right now, most cities are doing neither.
The Dingo Take
There is something almost cosmically absurd about the situation we're in. We have a city in the literal Sonoran Desert that has built a working, measurable, replicable system for keeping people from dying in extreme heat. We have thousands of people dead in France and England this summer. We have 44 Americans who didn't make it to July 5th. And the takeaway from most governments is essentially: huh, wild summer, anyway.
The cruelty of this particular moment is that it's not complicated. Phoenix didn't invent cold fusion. They hired a person whose job it was to care, kept some buildings open late, and fixed some broken AC units for people who couldn't afford to fix them themselves. The people dying in heatwaves in England and Europe and across the US are dying because that basic level of organized, sustained giving-a-damn does not exist where they live. That's it. That's the whole tragedy.
And look, the federal government in Washington right now is not exactly rushing to fund cooling centres or appoint heat czars or do much of anything that would help regular people survive a warming planet. The administration that pulled out of climate agreements and stuffed agencies with fossil fuel loyalists is not going to lead on this. Which means cities and counties have to do it themselves, with whatever resources they can scrape together, against a problem that grows larger every single year. Phoenix showed it can be done. Whether anyone else chooses to try is a political decision, not a scientific one. Remember that when someone tells you heat deaths are inevitable.
