You can’t escape the orange. That’s what travelers this summer have been reckoning with — swaths of tangerine, traffic cone and burnt sienna on maps indicating record high temperatures around the globe. Four concurrent heat domes from the southern United States to East Asia descended on millions — Phoenix residents enduring 31 days of 110-degree-plus temperatures. Italians in more than a dozen cities under extreme weather warnings. And in South Korea, at least 125 people were hospitalized for heat-related conditions at the World Scout Jamboree.

In Florida, it got so bad in June that Jacki Barber, 50, a clinical social worker and eighth-generation Floridian, canceled a beach trip to St. Augustine. “The water temperature was like 89 degrees,” Ms. Barber said.

“We’re used to hurricanes ruining plans, tropical storms, even just bad thunderstorms,” she said. “But I don’t recall ever looking at anyone and saying ‘It’s too hot to go to the beach.’”

As the summer travel engine kicked into high gear this year, it wasn’t just the scorching heat affecting carefully laid plans. There were also fires, floods, tornadoes and hail storms. Eight inches of rainfall left parts of Vermont coping with catastrophic floods. Tens of thousands of people, including thousands of tourists, had to evacuate islands in Greece because of wildfires. (Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Wednesday offered a free weeklong stay in 2024 to those travelers affected — in spring or fall.) The popular music festival Awakenings canceled a date in the Netherlands because of concern over hail, lightning and thunderstorms.

Increasingly dangerous weather now hits classic summer destinations, with conditions growing more erratic, expensive and deadly. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States has experienced four climate disasters since May, each causing over a billion dollars in damages. The National Park Service estimates that more visitors have died of heat-related causes since June than do in an average year. The indirect toll is almost certainly higher: A recent study found that summer heat waves killed 61,000 people in Europe last year.

Summer trips have long been treasured. Sure, airport lines are longer and hotel rooms go quicker, but school’s out, the sun’s out and beaches beckon. Summer travel cuts across social class; whether you go to a state fair or Sardinia, you cash in precious vacation days. You suntan, you eat more indulgently and reach for your wallet with less angst. Travel helps you hide from reality, or at least pause it for a bit.

But even if the idea of a summer getaway remains culturally resilient, is it still practical? Where to go is certainly less obvious — you can’t hide from reality when reality is 100-degree seawater, or a raging wildfire.

For decades, science has confirmed that unabated climate change will cause more misery, more hardship and cost millions of lives in the years to come. We’re getting a taste of the results this summer. Our relationship to travel has reached a tipping point. What happens when we can’t just vacation through it?

Strong demand, migrating patterns

Despite all the crises, global arrivals — the total number of tourists who cross a border — are projected to be up 30 percent from last year, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research division of the media company. The World Tourism Organization reports that travel to Europe is now at 90 percent of prepandemic levels.

And tourism is big business. The sector’s growth outperformed global gross domestic product growth by more than 40 percent in 2019, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. That same year it employed 333 million people worldwide — equivalent to one in 10 jobs — and accounted for more than 10 percent of the global economy.

So endless lines once again stretch toward the Louvre, around the Colosseum and up the steps to the Acropolis (which has already closed several times this summer during the afternoon hours). The visitors who line up there and at other destinations aren’t easily deterred by sweltering temperatures. They bought flights, they paid for rooms, and they scheduled and apportioned their limited time. A spokeswoman for Booking.com, Leslie Cafferty, said that the company was “not seeing any signals of people pivoting or rethinking their original travel plans.”

Susanne Becken, a professor of sustainable tourism at Griffith University, in Australia, said the issues we face are compounded in part by consistent global tourism practices over the past 50 years.

“Everything has been geared for that desire to seek the sun,” she said. Think of the airports, accommodations and other capital-intensive projects erected to serve the visitors of historically sunny places. “Accordingly, we’ve built massive infrastructure in the likes of the Mediterranean and Mexico and so on.”

Now Italy offers nearly 1.1 million hotel rooms; Finland has fewer than 65,000. Decades of predictable travel have dug deep grooves to popular hubs, complicating the most intuitive solution to a changing climate: simply going somewhere else.

Yet change is coming, whether or not cooler destinations have the room. The European Commission projects that tourism on the continent — already the world’s biggest tourist draw — will grow regardless of warming conditions, but that higher temperatures will migrate demand, sending more tourists to Northern Europe instead of the Mediterranean. Southern regions would lose nearly 10 percent of their current summer tourists in one scenario.

Already some travelers have been altering their itineraries.

Miku Sekizawa and her family planned to fly from Chicago to Athens in August, but the weather gave her pause. She’s expecting, due in November, and also has a 2-year-old. “We changed our itinerary last week since we realized how hot it is over there. I am no good at dealing with heat and being pregnant,” Ms. Sekizawa, a 36-year-old accountant, said. Since they booked with points and free cancellation policies, they changed their flights and are instead visiting Paris, Strasbourg and Amsterdam.

But temperate destinations are confronting their own climate issues. Avery Baldwin, a 27-year-old tennis coach who lives in Brooklyn, has regularly visited a small town in New Hampshire his whole life. Rain has pummeled the area this summer; a University of Massachusetts Amherst study found that more precipitation has fallen in New Hampshire every year in the past 10 years than the 20th-century average.

“It is definitely a frequent conversation topic,” Mr. Baldwin said. Wet conditions make the usual activities, like hiking, more treacherous and drive people indoors. “There’s always puzzles,” he said, adding that he plans to return this summer.

Some governments are implementing policies to reroute tourist traffic. China has committed to building large mountain resorts as part of a program it calls “22 degree destinations” — 22 Celsius (or 72 Fahrenheit) being the optimal holiday temperature, according to China — designed to lure domestic tourists from cities like Shanghai and Beijing during the hottest months. Dr. Becken, the sustainable tourism professor, attended a climate change conference at which the government unveiled the initiative. “They’re systematically building up resorts in the mountains,” she said.

Cancellations and rising costs

Hotels, tour operators and service providers too must contend with increasingly volatile conditions threatening their livelihoods and frustrating their customers.

“People are coming here generally to do something,” said Pierce McCully, the proprietor of Villa Trieste M in the Italian town of Asolo. Nestled in the foothills of the Dolomites, the villa is popular with hikers and cyclists. But this summer the area has suffered through a series of extreme weather incidents, from persistent rains to a hailstorm that made international headlines. Over a quarter of bookings canceled, and the visitors who do come rely more on indoor amenities. “We really wanted to avoid having TVs,” Mr. McCully said, but guests stuck in a room can raid the minibar only so many times.

Chris Kelly and Nina Rehfeld, a husband-and-wife team who own Grand Canyon Journeys, a tour business based in Sedona, Ariz., said they had become more cautious when offering hikes into Grand Canyon National Park and nearby Antelope Canyon.

“This year it seems downright dangerous,” Ms. Rehfeld said. Two women in their 70s booked a walk through Antelope Canyon during a heat spell; temperatures topped 110 degrees in the shade. Mr. Kelly took them on a driving tour instead, shuttling between landmarks with the air-conditioning cranked up.

Jason Danoff offers guided hikes and biking tours with Trail Lovers Excursions, also in Sedona. Cancellations have caused his revenue to drop from last year. “You’re getting hit on both sides, because you’re paying the guide plus refunding the money,” he said. But when the Forest Service unexpectedly closes a property, or a heat wave imperils customer safety, there’s not much he can do. At the same time, Mr. Danoff’s insurance costs have increased 60 percent. He intends to push more bookings to the shoulder seasons, but that has its risks too.

“You might spend a ton of money to try to ramp up, say January and February,” he said, “but then you could have 50-plus days of precipitation, and it could be a complete loss.”

Who is looking out for the tourists?

To mitigate the heat in Paris, the Eiffel Tower has installed overhead misters and water stations for those waiting in line, according to Patrick Branco Ruivo, the tower’s director general. It has also moved more of its ticket sales to an online reservations system, which cuts down on wait times for visitors.

That’s just one stakeholder. The travel industry by its nature is fragmented: A daisy chain of operators — airlines, rental-car companies, tour guides, insurance providers, hotels and restaurants, museums or cultural attractions — serve and profit from tourists, but they rarely function in lock step on any issue.

Indeed, a 2007 report commissioned by the World Tourism Organization, United Nations Environment Program and World Meteorological Organization said that academic studies of how local tourism officials and operators assess the risk of climate change found “relatively low levels of concern and little evidence of long-term strategic planning for future changes in climate.”

Historically, a tourism ministry was “a marketing office” with light research and investment capabilities, said Professor Becken. Tourism officials are given mandates to entice additional visitors and — aside from rare cases in some wealthy and over-touristed destinations, like Amsterdam — not turn them away on account of safety.

Some nations — not coincidentally, those most dependent on tourism — have disaster plans and agencies specifically for travelers. The Bahamas has established a Tourism Emergency Coordinating Committee to ensure that the industry can effectively respond in the case of a major hurricane.

Right now, many countries rely on local governments and volunteers. In Italy, “each region has its own civil protection system, and each city mayor has civil protection responsibilities,” said Pierfrancesco Demilito, the head of the press office at the Italian Civil Protection Department. The department helps allocate resources nationally, but “it is the mayor of Rome, or Florence, or Venice,” in the event of an extreme weather alert, who “decides the measures to be carried out,” he said.

But bracing for hotter conditions will require more synchronized efforts at the federal, state and municipal levels, and perhaps more dedicated agencies.

In the absence of national or unified support, planning may fall to corporations with pockets deep enough to marshal resources at scale. “Disney is sort of a poster child for a really good way to handle large numbers of people effectively,” said Daniel Scott, a professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. He suggested that the business model of globalized tourism may start to mimic the integrated resorts typified by Disney, where a single entity owns the infrastructure and controls visitor experiences with greater predictability.

It’s impossible to know where we go from here. But the cognitive dissonance of summer travel in a warming world is catching up to us. Tragic headlines and statistics are prompting hard looks at the nature of tourism: who benefits and who gets to participate. More people will find themselves confronting personal and increasingly tough decisions — and, like Ms. Barber, perhaps choosing a less appealing but more comfortable option: “We just all stayed home and huddled in a room with the air-conditioner on,” she said.

Lauren Sloss and Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.

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Remi Lucidi, a sergeant in the French Army, died far from a battlefield. His body was found last week aside a Hong Kong skyscraper where he had been spotted near the rooftop.

In his spare time, Mr. Lucidi, 30, was a “rooftopper,” shorthand for someone who takes photos and selfies from the tops of tall buildings, sometimes by trespassing. After his death was reported, some Instagram users debated the value and purpose of his art, which involved clambering onto ledges and antennae in cities across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

To friends and admirers, Mr. Lucidi’s spine-tingling photos were the work of a talented, restless adventurer. To his critics, they were a case study in reckless risk-taking.

That debate mirrors tensions within a broader movement called “urban exploration,” or “urbex,” one that is often associated with people who trespass in order to tell the stories of abandoned properties. Rooftopping is part of urbex, but many of its practitioners are more interested in producing social media content than in exploring marginal urban landscapes with a quasi-academic spirit.

In an extreme example, the Russian model Viki Odintcova dangled from a Dubai skyscraper without safety equipment. Her stunt generated more than 1.6 million views after she posted it on Instagram in 2017, and plenty of criticism.

“To Model Viki Odintcova: That Photo Was Really Not Worth Risking Your Life,” read the headline of a Forbes commentary. (She did not respond to a request for comment.) Several others around the world have died while rooftopping in recent years.

Criticism sometimes comes from within the urban-exploration movement. A prominent rooftooper, the Toronto-based photographer Neil Ta, quit the practice about a decade ago, saying that he had been disillusioned to see the pastime turn into a contest over who could take the most dangerous pictures. Other critics are urbex veterans who object to the rooftopping ethos.

“Rooftopping is focused more on the thrill and the experience of being in high, vertiginous and perilous locations, whereas urbex explores abandoned places in a way that is safer, more documentational and historical in nature,” HK Urbex, a collective of masked explorers in Hong Kong, said in a statement.

HK Urbex, whose members venture into abandoned or dangerous sites across the Chinese territory as a way of exploring its history, said that rooftoppers have died around the world from a combination of inexperience, overconfidence and the desire to take thrilling pictures.

“A life is not worth a like on social media,” the collective said.

Theo Kindynis, a sociologist who has studied rooftopping, said that to many urban explorers, young rooftoppers who engage in made-for-Instagram antics are known as “dangle kiddies.”

“Remi’s Instagram is full of the same tropes — legs dangling in front of a cityscape, selfie stick on top of a mast, silhouetted figure on a ledge — that were already becoming cliché in 2016,” said Mr. Kindynis, a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, referring to Mr. Lucidi.

Some rooftoppers push back against that characterization. One is Baptiste Hermant, 23, a Frenchman who has posted “dangling” photos but described himself in an interview as an explorer, not a rooftopper.

Mr. Hermant said most of his urban exploration happens off camera, and that he does it mainly for the pleasure of drinking beer with his friends on rooftops, after nighttime climbs, while watching the sunrise.

“To be on a roof is just my thing,” Mr. Hermant said, adding that he sees urban exploration as a natural outgrowth of a childhood spent scaling rocks and trees.

As for Mr. Lucidi, his friends described him in interviews as an experienced climber who had a particular interest in Hong Kong’s dramatic skyline. A statement posted to one of his Instagram pages this week called him an “extraordinary photographer who captured the beauty of the world from breathtaking heights.”

One of his friends, the Bulgarian rooftopper Yordan Boev, said on Instagram that he planned to “conquer fear everyday” as a way of honoring his friend’s legacy.

“Steel towers are very much like friendships,” he wrote in another post that showed the two men taking a selfie together in Bulgaria, with Mr. Lucidi holding the camera. “We build them strong and tall.”

Julien Kolly, a gallerist in Zurich who represents a French graffiti artist known for urban exploration, said that Mr. Lucidi reminded him of Alain Robert, a French stuntman who has scaled buildings around the world for decades. He added that Mr. Lucidi’s social media posts were merely a product of his era.

“During his time, Alain Robert could only rely on the press to cover his ascents, whereas nowadays, Remi Enigma takes charge of staging and photographing his own exploits to feed his Instagram account,” Mr. Kolly said, referring to Mr. Lucidi’s Instagram nom de plume.

Mr. Lucidi’s death was confirmed by telephone on Thursday by the French military and reported earlier by The South China Morning Post and other news outlets. He was on vacation in Hong Kong when he died, said a French military spokesperson who declined to be named, citing protocol.

The Hong Kong authorities have not confirmed the exact circumstances of the death, saying only that the police officers found Mr. Lucidi’s body after responding to a call from a security guard.

Mr. Lucidi’s Instagram page includes 143 posts from excursions around the world — London, Bangkok, Dubai, Mexico City and so on. In one post, he explained that he traveled widely “to get more adrenaline to find a better way to enjoy life.”

Many of his posts were accompanied by hashtags like #urbanrogues and #scaryhighstuffs, and playful captions that made light of the risks he took to get his shots.

“Relaxing on the Edge,” he wrote of lying on a roof ledge in Warsaw two years ago.

Mr. Lucidi had made several trips to Hong Kong. His last target there was the Tregunter Towers, a three-building luxury residence that sits on a quiet, winding road near the mountainous spine of the city’s main island — high above the trams, buses, office buildings and pedestrians below. The South China Morning Post reported that a witness had seen him knocking on the window of a 68th-floor penthouse.

On Friday morning, security guards at the complex were standing behind a black gate shrouded by subtropical foliage with purple flowers. Domestic workers guided pedigree dogs and baby strollers up and down narrow, twisting sidewalks.

A few runners were heading further uphill, toward a hiking trail that climbs through a forest to a mountain peak with panoramic views. Some paused to look back at the same skyline that Mr. Lucidi had captured in his last post.