Around 2,300 people died in 12 European cities due to an extreme heat wave that hit the region from June 23 to July 2, a rapid scientific analysis has found. Researchers also estimated that roughly 1,500 of those deaths, or 65%, were attributable to anthropogenic climate change. “Climate change has made it significantly hotter than it would have been, which in turn makes it a lot more dangerous,” Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London, told Reuters. The heat wave, which hit most of Europe and northern Asia in June and early July, was found to be 2–4° Celsius (3.6–7.2° Fahrenheit) hotter during the 10-day stretch than it would have been without fossil fuel-driven climate change in 11 of the 12 cities evaluated. The study’s authors looked at a dozen large metropolitan centers in Europe, including Rome, London, Paris and Frankfurt, and found that only Lisbon experienced a smaller climate-driven increase, of less than 2°C (3.6°F). Data on the actual number of observed deaths during the heat wave weren’t officially available at the time of the analysis, so the researchers estimated excess heat-related deaths that may have occurred during the 10-day period by using epidemiological models that establish the relationship between heat and deaths as well as historical mortality data. They estimate there were 2,305 excess heat-related deaths during the heat wave, with 1,504 deaths attributable to climate change. More than 80% of the deaths were estimated for those older than 65 years. While heat-related deaths tend to be…This article was originally published on Mongabay