This time, I was sure, we were going to have to cancel the school fair. At the end of June, Paris was still reeling in the rain. The chorus and buffet of “food of the world” threatened to take place beneath the fleet. So I complained to the director of my son’s kindergarten. “Let’s keep hope and not complain, at least we can end the year in peace!” »he whispered to me. Between the flood and the heat wave, their choice was made. And in fact I saw her again, two summers before, forced to spray the school yard with a stream of water to mitigate the effects of the incandescent slab, thus allowing the children to breathe a little and, above all, finish their lessons. the year without unscrewing.
This is the image that came to me when a few weeks ago I entered a climate chamber, a kind of cabin heated to 50°C, to perform a series of physical and mental exercises for thirty minutes. The device, called “Climate Sense”, and presented at Batimat, the fair for construction professionals in Paris, was devised by the explorer and researcher Christian Clot, a specialist in adaptation to climate change. It allows you to experience life for a few moments under the effect of an unprecedented heat wave in France, but possible under the effect of climate change, in the south of the country for example, within a few decades. I went there in the company of Alexandre Florentin, an environmental advisor from Paris and president of an information and assessment mission on heat waves in Paris entitled “Paris at 50 ° C”, whose experience was of great interest.
Walking ten minutes on a treadmill didn’t cost us that much. Things started to get difficult when I had to play Docteur Maboul, a fine motor game for which my hand was too soft and too feverish. Then I failed simple math problems. My 10 year old daughter probably would have solved some of them. My reasoning ability, under the effect of this intense heat, simply refused to mobilize. “The physique still holds, but the brain is not possible”concluded Alexandre Florentin, sitting in the chair next to him. It’s hard to see why younger brains wouldn’t suffer the same fate, without even reaching these thermal extremes.
Energy labeling
An international study also established, in 2019, a correlation between the temperature in classrooms in countries with temperate climates and students’ learning performance. The latter increase by 20% when the temperature decreases from 30°C to 20°C, and vice versa. Young neurons function worse when simmering in a jar. And jars may soon become teapots. In France, the consulting firm EcoAct evaluated, in 2023, the exposure of nursery schools to climate change and concluded that more than 7,000 schools, or 1.3 million children between 1 and 3 years old, will be exposed to a temperature that could exceed 35° C in classrooms by 2030, including almost all schools in Bouches-du-Rhône, Gironde, Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis.
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