Worst case climate simulations show that heatwaves could cause major disruptions in the Paris 2024 Olympics

The Summer Olympic Games in 2024 will take place during the apex of the temperature seasonal cycle in the Paris Area. The midlatitudes of the Northern hemisphere have witnessed a few intense heatwaves since the 2003 event [1]. Those heatwaves have had environmental and health impacts, which often came as surprises [2]. In this paper, we search for the most extreme heatwaves in Ile-de-France that are physically plausible, under climate change scenarios, for the decades around 2024. We circumvent the sampling limitation by applying a rare event algorithm [3] on CMIP6 data [4] to evaluate the range of such extremes. We find that the 2003 record can be exceeded by more than 4°C in Ile-de-France before 2050, with a combination of prevailing anticyclonic conditions and cutoff lows. This study intends to build awareness on those unprecedented events, against which our societies are ill-prepared. Those results could be extended to other areas of the world