00:00The past decade is the warmest on record, and Europe is the world's fastest warming continent.
00:06Well, let's speak to John Grant, who's a senior lecturer in sustainable construction and climate change at Sheffield Hallam University.
00:13John, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
00:15First of all, why is this? Is this to do with man-made climate change, part of a broader trend?
00:22Or is this just weather events in terms of jet streams and El Nino and things like that?
00:30Well, that's the thing. They're all connected.
00:34This extreme weather is driven by the fact that we are pumping more and more carbon dioxide.
00:40Last year was the highest amount of carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere.
00:44And it is an undisputed reality that the more carbon dioxide you've got in the atmosphere, the more heat, the more energy is in that system.
00:54And so the chance of having an extreme weather event like what we are having at the moment increases.
01:01It's as simple as that. Probability.
01:04We're seeing very different weather across the continent, aren't we?
01:08What do you think is behind this regional variation?
01:10Well, Europe is a really diverse sort of geography.
01:17We've got the Atlantic Ocean at one side, the Mediterranean in the centre, Africa below it, and then the very cool Arctic above.
01:26And the interaction between the mountain ranges and the like, it's very, very hard to predict, because as the weather moves mostly from the southwest to the northeast,
01:40because the Earth is rotating, and so the weather sort of tends to move across us that way.
01:46But then you have all these other interactions with it, which is just confusing everything, which is why it's very, very difficult to predict weather.
01:56But climate, when you look at it, the long-term trend is so much easier.
02:00And because it's much warmer in the Arctic above us, we're getting this drawdown of the cool air, would you believe?
02:08So, and that is forcing the warm air to concentrate a lot more over southern Europe, as well as the extremely warm temperatures of the Mediterranean at the moment.
02:19John, I just want to pick up on a point you made just now about how it's very difficult to predict weather, and certainly it is.
02:26But we can certainly prepare for it, can't we?
02:29Oh, yes.
02:29What can be done, do you think, to prepare for or to mitigate the effect in years to come?
02:35What more can we be doing now?
02:38Well, we could, first of all, absolutely, your governments have to establish that there is an emergence, that this is a climate emergency,
02:50no less urgent than, let's say, the preparation of the war, which we're sadly hearing about.
02:56Also, with regards to global dynamics.
03:01And once we establish that we're in a global emergency, then we can employ a lot of this technology that I myself have been working on for the last 30 years, there's a lot we can do.
03:15It doesn't come cheap, but does have a long-term benefit.
03:19But the implications of the cost, if we do nothing, is not that things will stay the same.
03:28I hear people talk about this is a new normal.
03:31This is not a new normal.
03:33We are in a transition to a normal.
03:36And honestly, we don't know what that normal is going to be, other than it's going to be a lot warmer than it is now.
03:42And so there's plenty of technology.
03:44We can reinforce our infrastructure.
03:47We can protect our crops from the extreme weather events.
03:51We can protect ourselves from both the very, very warm, humid temperatures.
03:55But also, again, counterintuitively, there's a chance that we can get very, very warm, humid temperatures as well.
04:02This is an age of extremes.
04:07John Grant, thank you very much indeed for that.
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