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Climate scientists say that Europe is heating faster than any other continent, and that makes formerly temperate cities like Paris unbearably hot. And it's forcing the French to reconsider something they had thought was unneeded and that they dislike - air conditioning. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: France has been at the epicenter of Europe's hottest summer ever. Paris summer temperatures used to hover in the mid-80s. Three consecutive heat waves this year have already pushed the thermometer over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end.
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BEARDSLEY: Desperate shoppers fought over air-conditioning units and fans at a Paris DIY store in this scene shown on news channel TF1. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen wasted no time capitalizing on the deadly heat despite her party's skepticism over climate change.
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MARINE LE PEN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "It's absurd to let people die in the heat," she told a crowd while out campaigning, shown on BFM TV. "You can have your opinion, but if I'm elected president, I'll put in place a massive air-conditioning plan, starting with the most vulnerable."
President Emmanuel Macron's environment minister, Monique Barbut, argued that emissions from AC are one reason the planet is overheating in the first place.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: (Speaking French).
MONIQUE BARBUT: (Speaking French).
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: (Speaking French).
BARBUT: (Speaking French).
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "I'm horrified by people who say, oh, let's just put in air conditioning everywhere," she said on Radio France news. "Do you think that will stop forest fires or crops from burning up or farm animals from dying?"
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: The great French air-conditioning debate is on, though traditional lines are blurring, as many who once rejected AC as noisy, unaesthetic and oh-so American now say they want it. While health and climate experts agree schools and hospitals should be climatisee, they say putting AC in every building in cities like Paris would be a terrible idea.
You have a cool place.
EYTAN LEVI: Yeah. It's really nice.
BEARDSLEY: I meet architect Eytan Levi in a 19th-century building in central Paris that houses the Climate Academy, a city-run organization helping raise public awareness about climate change. He says air conditioning doesn't work well in Paris for many reasons. Laws ban modifying historic building facades. AC also pumps hot air outside.
LEVI: When you are in a very dense city like Paris, and not much green space in between, the hot air is all going to agglomerate. And it's going to increase the air temperature quite a lot.
BEARDSLEY: He says air conditioning should be a last resort after other fixes are made. We sit in the shade of the building's inner cobblestone courtyard, which he says used to be a parking lot.
LEVI: Smartly, they decided to plant, I believe, 12 fruit trees.
BEARDSLEY: He says the greenery has brought the temps from 95 degrees in direct sun down to 77 under the canopy. To block direct sunlight, City Hall is ripping out stone plazas across Paris and replacing them with mini forests, and greenery is popping up on rooftops.
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BEARDSLEY: We go to the rooftop of the Climate Academy, full of wooden planters on a wooden deck. It's a pilot project for a company called Roofscapes that Levi has co-founded.
LEVI: How can we, as architects, very much focus on adapting what's already built and what's no longer performing well because the climate is changing and because the way we use those buildings is also changing?
BEARDSLEY: He says they started with rooftops because 80% of Paris roofs are made of zinc and slate - a huge heat conductor. But this roof looks like a dense garden.
LEVI: It's a mix of local plants from the Paris region and plants from the south of France that are more Mediterranean plants, and that are better suited to heat waves like the one we're going through right now.
BEARDSLEY: But only half this roof is decked. We look across at the exposed zinc rooftop.
LEVI: These are the ones...
BEARDSLEY: Levi opens a box to check the temperature sensors, comparing the two.
LEVI: From the part of the roof that is not shaded by our platform. So right now, we see zinc that is overheating. We see that on the zinc roof surface, 62 degrees Celsius.
BEARDSLEY: Which is what Fahrenheit? Around?
LEVI: Shall we check quickly?
BEARDSLEY: Yeah. Let's check. Yeah.
LEVI: Let's check.
BEARDSLEY: Oh my God. Almost 144 degrees Fahrenheit.
The wood-covered roof measures half that - a cool 70 degrees. The Paris garret apartments below these picturesque zinc roofs are uninhabitable in these heat waves, says urban planner Magda Maaoui, who used to live in one and is part of an association called the Top Floor Collective fighting for more resources to battle the new heat.
MAGDA MAAOUI: Everybody thinks of it as Gene Kelly, "An American In Paris." It's stylish. It's Bohemian - whatever. But it's not really. In crises of heat waves, you basically have to find a climate refuge somewhere else. You can't live in your house anymore.
BEARDSLEY: This urban planner and this architect say they are not against air conditioning, but say it's only part of a comprehensive strategy needed to prepare this historic, densely populated and fragile city for a hotter climate.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
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