How many people does heat actually kill?

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler You have likely seen a headline like this: 62,000 people died from record-breaking heat in Europe: link It’s a striking number. It’s also not clear what it means. Is this the number of people killed by extreme heat? Or climate change’s contributions to the extreme heat? Or the number of deaths above what we would expect in a normal summer? Or something else. This matters a lot. If we want to accurately communicate the impact of climate c