In Europe the next heat dome is already building. Another wave of hundred-degree days will soon sweep across Britain and the mainland as 200 million Americans mark the United States’ birthday by sweltering under our own extreme temperatures.

And the one last week? There are three big things to know, I think, about the astounding climatic anomaly that happened in Europe, with records shattered in half a dozen countries, more than a thousand people dying in a single week and roads melting and tram tracks buckling and bus drivers fainting and crashing in the historic heat.

The first is that the heat wave was so intense that in a stable preindustrial environment, according to one estimate, it would have been the kind of freak event the region could expect about once every 26,000 years.

The second is that, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution, a heat wave of this magnitude has grown more than 100 times as likely just since the landmark European heat wave of 2003.

The third is that, according to Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth, last week’s freak event isn’t even that freakish anymore. Measured not against a stable climate we’ve long since left behind but against a base line of rising global temperatures, the heat in Bordeaux, France, for instance, registered only its fifth-largest deviation over the past century. That would make it, he suggested, a once-in-20-years event. As temperatures not only rise but do so more quickly, we should expect to see temperatures like those even more often — every few years, perhaps, across Western Europe. We might approach those temperatures again within just a few weeks.

These three data points offer three ways of looking at a mind-bending climate extreme like this one. Other ways offer some reassuring context: for instance, that this heat wave was only about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 degrees Celsius) warmer than it would have been 50 years ago.

Nevertheless, the three points suggest a very vivid and pretty harrowing story: that a heat wave this intense was essentially impossible to imagine for the entire duration of human civilization until now; that over just a couple of decades, climate change has made it perhaps 100 times as likely as before this century; and that we might expect something like this not maybe once across tens of thousands of years but pretty reliably every few years.

If you find yourself asking — as many sweltering Europeans have asked over the past week and many Americans, too — why the countries of Northern Europe were not better prepared for such intense heat and why they haven’t embraced air-conditioning, as the United States or Canada or Japan has, the data points to one obvious answer. These kinds of conditions were genuinely unthinkable not very long ago, and the rate of change is progressing so rapidly that they have become routine faster than large-scale adaptation has managed to keep up, even after heat events in 2003 and 2010 that each killed tens of thousands of people. Some estimates suggest as many as 60,000 died as recently as 2022.

Over the past week, these figures have prompted a trans-Atlantic heat wave blame game, with a few French politicians attributing responsibility to American carbon emissions and technophilic Americans, in particular, shaking their heads at the lack of European air-conditioning and treating this failure of climate adaptation as an ideological problem — some mix of heavy-handed European regulation, climate virtue signaling and degrowthism.

I find that argument maddening: Climate change experts have been warning for many years about the risks of extreme heat and the need to take action against it, and though some people might have resisted adaptations that require more carbon dioxide emissions, the main reasons that air-conditioning in Northern Europe lags the United States are that the climate there was much cooler historically, the mores are different and the built environment is difficult and expensive to retrofit. But it is true that A.C. needs to be deployed much faster and that Europeans are suffering because of the slow rollout. By most measures, Europe has higher risk for heat mortality than hotter and poorer parts of the world. And it’s hard to deny there is some ideological pattern at play, given the thread of anti-A.C. talk in European media over the past week or the way that the French Socialist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon decried mass air-conditioning at the peak of the heat wave.

But with climate, as with so much else, I think we resort to ideological finger-pointing when the structural challenges of the world frustrate us, choosing to blame this party or that cohort or a particular strident corner of social media rather than acknowledge that some things are just really difficult — like rebuilding much of the physical infrastructure of a continent to make it more resilient to a rapidly warming climate. And as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, if progressives shy away from talking about what climate change demands, plenty of others will be happy to fill the vacuum with their own talking points.

Across Europe, there is considerable national and regional variability when it comes to air-conditioning, with warmer countries exhibiting much more uptake. But Paris is north of all of Nova Scotia and is cooler in the summer than Seattle, where before its lethal heat wave in 2021 only 44 percent of homes had air-conditioning. London is farther north and milder still. Northern European cities are old and dense, with buildings designed to retain heat in winter, and though the continent can be broadly caricatured as more climate-conscious and more left wing than the United States, the truth is much more patchwork, as you’d expect across dozens of countries with varying national politics and regulatory cultures. And then there are what might seem like trivial complications, like whether existing windows can even accommodate cooling units and whether compressors can be safely set on sloping roofs. Also, as you might have heard, the price of electricity is quite high over there.

There are already signs of the tide turning for European A.C., which is great. But the job of retrofitting the planet is an enormous one, even if everyone were rowing in the right direction — as Americans should appreciate, given how much time we’ve spent over the past few years complaining about how hard it is to build anything and how poorly we’re managing the growing wildfire threat or planning for horrific inland flooding or adapting our home insurance to the way warming has redrawn the risk map.

And one lesson of these pummeling, sequential extreme temperature events — one heat dome after another after another — is that we’re going to have to do an awful lot to make a future punctuated by so many more of them manageable. Air-conditioning is not a cure-all for the problems of extreme heat. It does not address crop losses and the mass deaths of animals, as we’ve seen in Europe, let alone evaporative damage to soil and waterways or the effects on outdoor labor and infrastructure designed and built under entirely different climatic regimes. But presumably we need a whole lot more of it — not just in Europe but in the hotter parts of the world, as well.

That’s what climate experts mean when they say, as they have said for more than a decade, that warming not only changes everything but also requires that so much be changed. To pretend adaptation is simple is to live in denial of the pace and scale of warming.