Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

Across Europe in June, from the Czech Republic to Switzerland to Spain, new heat records tested the Continent’s defenses. Schools were shuttered. Villages were evacuated. Soldiers battled wildfires. And social workers raced to the homes of older people to prevent mass deaths.

It wasn’t only monthly records that shattered. On Friday, a town in the south of France felt like Death Valley, Calif., in August: According to the French national weather agency, Gallargues-le-Montueux was 45.9 degrees Celsius, or 115 degrees, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country.

It is part of an unmistakable trend: The hottest summers in Europe in the last 500 years have all come in the last 17 years. Several of those heat waves bear the fingerprints of human-caused climate change. In years to come, scientists say, many more are likely to batter what is naturally one of the world’s temperate zones.

“It is quite clear one has to treat it as an emergency,” said Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist doing postdoctoral research at the Earth Institute at Columbia University.