Europe’s Furnace Homes: The Price of Political Cowardice, Paid by the Vulnerable

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/06/europe-cannot-air-condition-its-way-out.html

Still following my previous post, “On Europe’s catastrophic heatwave collapse” (linked above), Reuters has now revealed the architectural dimension of the disaster: Europe is not merely being hit by extreme heat. It is being hit by extreme heat inside buildings designed to resist a different century.Not badly built. Worse: efficiently built for the wrong enemy. Built to preserve warmth. Built to defeat winter. Built for a Europe that has disappeared from the climate system but remains alive in building codes, renovation policies and official complacency.https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hot-stuck-paris-london-homes-not-built-heat-2026-06-26/

This is the real scandal. Europe spent decades improving buildings for one half of the climate problem while neglecting the other, insulating, sealing and regulating in the name of energy efficiency, with winter as the dominant model. Now those same buildings trap heat with the efficiency of a well-designed mistake. This is not merely discomfort. It is architectural obsolescence on a continental scale. Parisian attic flats beneath zinc roofs become furnaces. London homes overheat. Schools close. Hospitals struggle. The elderly are told to stay indoors, as if indoors were still a place of protection. A dwelling can satisfy every formal standard and still fail at the most basic civilisational function: protecting human beings from hostile weather.

Reuters reports that only around a quarter of European households have air conditioning, compared with roughly 90% in the United States and Japan. At first, this may sound like ecological virtue. In reality, it exposes Europe’s immense adaptation gap: neither the cooling equipment of richer societies nor the passive resilience that would make such equipment largely unnecessary, but a housing stock stranded between old climate assumptions and new thermal realities. This is why the usual language has become unbearable. Strategy. Resilience. Renovation wave. Climate neutrality. Just transition. The vocabulary is immaculate. The buildings are not. Europe’s problem is not the absence of documents; it is the absence of consequences. Policymakers knew heatwaves would intensify. They knew dense cities, ageing populations, poor housing and insufficient cooling would collide. Yet overheating was still treated as a secondary inconvenience rather than a public-health emergency.

And Europe cannot simply import the American answer of mass air conditioning. It may cool those who can afford it, but it also raises peak electricity demand and can worsen the urban heat-island effect. The answer is not more machines attached to bad buildings and failed policy and political cowardice. It is external shading before decorative façades, cool roofs before slogans, passive cooling before dependence on peak electricity, and deep renovation measured not by winter savings alone, but by summer survivability. Because survivability is the word Europe still avoids. A building is not sustainable if it becomes dangerous during a heatwave. A city is not resilient because it has a plan. It is resilient only if its poorest, oldest and sickest residents can survive the next thermal shock without luck, charity or wet towels.

The tragedy is not that Europe lacked knowledge. It had the knowledge, the money, the universities, the engineers, the climate models, the directives, the committees and the warning signs and still managed to build, renovate and regulate its way into a furnace.

Declaration of competing interests - I am currently preparing a new edition of Eco-efficient Materials for Reducing Cooling Needs in Buildings and Construction, originally published by Elsevier in 2020. What could once be framed as a specialised technical field, cool pavements, façades, roofs, smart glazing and passive cooling technologies has now become a matter of public urgency: whether European buildings can still protect human beings in the climate they actually inhabit, rather than in the climate for which they were designed.

Uma ferramenta de autoavaliação científica que muitos investigadores ainda não usam

 

Agora que vários concursos para lugares de professor catedrático começaram a exigir valores mínimos de h-index na plataforma Scopus, como há tempos dei conta aqui https://pachecotorgal.com/2023/08/05/mais-um-concurso-para-um-lugar-de-professor-catedratico-que-exige-um-h-index-minimo-igual-ou-superior-a-15-2/ aproveito agora para divulgar uma forma simples de estimar a previsão de crescimento do h-index Scopus.

Depois de aceder ao perfil do investigador na plataforma Scopus:

1.º Clique em “Search results format”.

2.º Clique em “Citation overview”.

3.º Não selecione a opção predefinida “All documents on this page”; escolha a segunda opção.

4.º Clique no ícone “Export” para gerar um ficheiro em formato CSV.

5.º Faça o upload do referido ficheiro para um modelo de IA e solicite uma análise da evolução anual das citações dos seus artigos, identificando quais os trabalhos que continuam a ganhar impacto, quais os que parecem ter estabilizado e de que forma essa dinâmica poderá influenciar a previsão futura de crescimento do h-index Scopus.

Esta estimativa não deve ser vista apenas como um exercício prospetivo, mas também como uma ferramenta útil de autoavaliação científica. Ao analisar a evolução das citações dos seus artigos, cada investigador pode perceber se a sua produção científica se encontra numa trajetória sustentada de crescimento em termos de impacto, ou se, pelo contrário, começou a revelar sinais de estagnação. Essa informação pode ajudar a ajustar estratégias de publicação, colaboração e até a selecionar temas de investigação mais competitivos.

Recordo que, há cinco anos, divulguei no meu primeiro blogue um estudo realizado por investigadores Alemães, com base numa amostra de mais de mil professores daquele país, que revelou que quase 40% não sabiam como se calculava o h-index ou julgavam sabê-lo, mas falharam um teste básico sobre o seu cálculo. Segundo os autores desse artigo, este resultado revelava um paradoxo significativo, pois uma métrica capaz de influenciar carreiras académicas, reputações científicas e processos de avaliação continuava a ser mal compreendida por uma parte considerável da comunidade académica alemã. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/04/university-of-dusseldorfdo-researchers.html

PS - Para o meu caso concreto, a previsão estimou um h-index Scopus de 68 em 2030 num cenário otimista e de 65 num cenário conservador. Por uma questão de prudência, decidi registar no meu perfil ORCID uma estimativa inferior: 63.  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7767-6787

On Europe’s catastrophic collapse, managed with excellence all the way to disaster

https://19-paheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/06/europes-cooling-emergency-preventing.html

On 6 June, in the post linked above, I wrote that Europe was beginning to draw a cruel new shadow line across its cities: between those who can buy their way into cooled interiors and those forced to endure the street, the workplace, the bus stop, the school, the hospital corridor and the overheated flat. Less than three weeks later, that warning already looks almost too mild.

What Europe is now experiencing is not simply another heatwave. It is the exposure of a profound political failure. Governments have spent years producing adaptation strategies, resilience plans, climate-neutral slogans and urban-transition documents, while millions still live, work and study in buildings dangerously unprepared for extreme heat. This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of treating overheating as a secondary problem until it becomes a public-health emergency.

The new heatwave sweeping across Europe has broken records, closed schools, disrupted transport, strained hospitals and pushed vulnerable people into danger. But the most damning sign is now even clearer: extreme heat is shutting down power plants. Nuclear reactors that rely on river water for cooling have had to reduce output because rivers are becoming too warm. Electricity demand rises precisely when the power system becomes more fragile. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/24/1139676/europe-heat-power-plants/

Nor is this only an energy problem. Across England, hospitals have declared critical incidents as radiotherapy machines, MRI scanners, IT systems and entire cooling units failed under extreme heat. Treatments were delayed, diagnostics stalled, and the machinery on which modern medicine depends was defeated by conditions that policymakers knew were coming. This is not an unfortunate technical malfunction. It is the consequence of running essential public infrastructure with too little resilience, too little investment and too much political complacency.  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/25/hospitals-nhs-england-critical-incidents-machines-it-fail-extreme-heat

Europe is discovering, in real time, that it cannot simply air-condition its way out of climate failure. The hotter it gets, the more cooling people need; the more cooling people need, the more pressure falls on energy and hospital systems already destabilised by heat. This is the vicious circle now becoming visible: extreme heat increases the demand for protection while weakening the very systems meant to provide it. Europe’s climate failure is no longer only environmental or social. It is becoming systemic and increasingly politically explosive.

PS - I had already warned in March 2022 about new physiological evidence published in the Journal of Applied Physiology that weakened one of the last comforting assumptions about human survival under extreme heat: the humid-heat limit may be closer to 31 ºC wet-bulb, not 35 ºC, even for healthy young people. For the elderly, the sick and the poor, the margin is smaller still. No wonder Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert had already written in 2019: “With regard to the climate crisis, yes, it’s time to panic.” https://pachecotorgal.com/2022/03/27/a-climatic-hell-in-the-making-and-a-study-that-reduces-the-chances-of-survival-of-a-healthy-human-being/