Europe braced on Wednesday for another day of a sweltering heatwave that has smashed records, left tens of thousands of people without power and sent air conditioner sales zooming in a continent unused and ill-equipped to handle searing heat. The extreme weather is being driven by atmospheric patterns that keep hot air trapped in place for days, with these factors worsened by global warming, experts say. France’s national temperature indicator — an average of daytime and nighttime temperatures across 30 stations — reached 29.8 °C on Tuesday, the hottest since measurements began in 1947.