00:00Brilliant. I'm joined now by Dr. Chloe Brimicum, a climate scientist from the University of Oxford.
00:06Chloe, thank you so much for your time. You know, in June, the World Meteorological Organization
00:11warned us that there were going to be really high temperatures, a combination of climate change
00:16and the El Nino weather phenomenon, which is particularly brutal this year.
00:20Do you think those warnings made any difference at all?
00:24Well, so the World Meteorological Organization's warnings were about weather that is going to occur
00:31later in the year, predominantly in the Pacific and then into next year.
00:36But the warnings around warming were very much, I guess, not heeded in terms of we've seen
00:41a number of days of record-breaking temperatures in the UK and also different countries in Europe.
00:47So, for example, in Vienna, they recorded for the first time above 40 degrees Celsius in
00:52that particular city. And then in the UK, we're looking at this coming week, another month where
00:59we exceed 35 degrees Celsius. And that would be the first time in sort of recorded observations
01:06of weather that we've seen that. So it's a very concerning time for the extreme weather
01:11that we're seeing in the UK and Europe.
01:13Do you think that these very high temperatures and, of course, the wildfires, which just break
01:18up so much more easily, are here to stay? Or do you think once El Nino subsides, and I
01:25understand it can take a couple of years, will things go back to slightly cooler weather?
01:31So we know that this particular weather in Europe is occurring because of climate change.
01:37So we know that climate change and fossil fuels are driving an increase in the number of heat
01:43waves, the intensity of them, and the duration of them when they occur. So we will have had
01:48five heat waves in the UK and other parts of Europe this summer coming up to this week.
01:54That might not be the last one that we see. And that's been a consecutive trend over at least
02:00the last five years in Europe. And coming on the back of that, we've also seen incredibly dry
02:05weather that's been long lasting. So for over 50 days, there is a place in the UK near London
02:12that has had no rainfall. And that's on the back of the winter where we had 40 days of
02:17consecutive rain. So it's very concerning. And then the impacts of this are on sort of things
02:22like health, whether that's air pollution from wildfires, from excess deaths from heat.
02:28And also we're seeing this heat and drought having an effect on our crops at the moment
02:32as well. And farmers saying that yields are a lot lower than they expected, right?
02:37What do we need to be doing? What do governments and communities need to be doing right now to
02:42make sure that we're better prepared?
02:46I think it's just to do with long term planning. A lot of the policy cycles are very fast. And
02:53actually, if we had long term planning for a transition to net zero and a more sort of resilient
02:59way that we put in place renewable energy, then, you know, actually, we wouldn't be having some of
03:05the effects we're seeing right now because extreme weather can be directly linked to the increase in
03:11greenhouse gases. So we wouldn't be seeing that. And so we need that in the future. What people can do
03:16right now is look out for one another, which I think we're seeing in a lot of cases. There's also
03:21a lot
03:21of solutions that we're seeing at community level where whether this is like planting trees,
03:29as some communities, they have hotlines for waves, for example, whether this is also to do with like
03:35things like this, education, climate education is also very key in schools and other educational
03:41settings. So there's lots of great initiatives out there, we just need to roll them out and have
03:46supported by long term policy planning.
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