Europe heatwave: UK breaks June temperature record

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1:17Hello to you. Welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. I'm Sean Lay, live in the BBC studios in London. Well, across Europe, there has been only one story making the headlines everywhere.

1:40An unprecedented heat wave in France. Temperatures peaked at 44.3 degrees Celsius yesterday and could be even higher by the end of today. Britain is bracing for the deadly threat of the hottest day ever. Much of Europe is sweltering in a heat wave that has seen temperatures soar above 40 degrees Celsius. From the UK to France, Germany and Spain, scorching hot days have been followed by nearly as hot nights. At least 94 million people across the continent experience temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius Wednesday, the majority of them in France and Spain. That's according to calculations by the news agency AFP.

2:20With public transport disrupted, many companies have encouraged employees to work from home. The day before, Spain had its hottest June day, whilst France on Wednesday experienced its hottest day in any month since back, well, quite a long time ago in fact, when it began measuring temperatures. That's 1947. In the region of Finisterre in northwest France, 68 ,000 people are without power after the heat knocked out some generating equipment more from there shortly. In Poland, heat warnings apply from Thursday to Saturday and Hungary has issued a warning of maximum temperatures from Saturday until Tuesday of next week.

2:58Here in the UK, the record for the hottest ever June day has been provisionally broken. Temperatures soared to 36.1 Celsius in Gosport in Hampshire. That's on the south coast of England. Well, the BBC's climate editor, Justin Rowlett, has been there and I asked him what it's been like. Well, I tell you what, it's been hard to get here because obviously we didn't know where the hottest temperature would be. We were given a very vague sense that it might be somewhere west of London, maybe between a town called Reading and another called Salisbury. So we kind of headed out here and we've kind of headed off to one town hearing that the Met Office was saying that was the hottest at one half hour and then spinning round to another.

3:36But finally made it to Gosport in Hampshire, which is just the other side of the estuary actually from Portsmouth, the famous naval port down here in the south of England. And what can I say, Sean? I mean, it is hot, but the sun is now going down. It's actually very beautiful here. And there's a light, I'll be honest with you, there's a light sea breeze. And I have to say, it's actually quite pleasant at the moment. That said, temperatures were unbelievably hot here earlier. And I say unbelievably because what we saw here was literally unprecedented. The highest June temperature ever recorded in Britain.

4:12Temperature records in Britain go back well over 100 years. So this is a really good data set. And it is unprecedented to see temperatures that high. One other thing to note, the record was broken by half a degree Celsius. Now, in meteorological terms, that is a lot. This record has been shattered. Our listeners in the southern hemisphere may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Why are these temperatures such a problem for Europeans? The problem is that we have, our culture, our society isn't used to temperatures this high. You know, our buildings aren't designed for it. Our roads, our railways aren't.

4:50You may be surprised if you live in a much hotter country in Africa or Asia. You may be surprised or you may actually laugh when you discover that many trains in Britain weren't running today because the rails get too hot. They're designed for lower temperatures. According to Network Rail that runs the rail network here in Britain, they get 20 degrees hotter than the ambient temperature of the air. So we're talking kind of 55, 60 degree temperatures, and they can't be certain that they stay straight at those temperatures and therefore have to reduce the number of trains they run. Our schools and hospitals aren't designed for this, particularly as modern buildings have been built with lots of plate glass.

5:30And now with these really high temperatures, they become greenhouses and become incredibly hot. So the Climate Change Committee, which is the kind of independent body that advises the government, is saying, guys, now's the time. We're going to have to put air conditioning into hospitals, schools, homes of vulnerable people. We need to begin to adapt Britain to recognise that we're now a much hotter country than we were. Briefly, Justin, does this mean that we're having to realise that maybe we haven't stepped up enough of a fight at this stage against what is being projected by the environmental scientists?

6:02Well, I quoted the, I mentioned the Climate Change Committee a moment ago. The Climate Change Committee gave its judgment on exactly that question, Sean, and it described successive government's effort to adapt Britain as woeful. And it said we really must be doing much more if we're going to be able to cope with the higher temperatures that we are inevitably going to face. The BBC's climate editor, Justin Rowlett. Let's hear how it's been in other parts of Europe on Wednesday. In the Netherlands, an extreme heat alert has been in effect. It's quite hot here in comparison to what it usually is in the Netherlands, and it presents quite a challenge for pet owners.

6:41Like the asphalt gets really warm, they need to cool off, so you try to find a spot of shade because you still need to go out to urinate and to poop. While Spain reached its highest daily average since at least 1950, this woman fled her home for an urban beach. Well, it's unbearably hot at the moment. You can't even sleep. But I'm having a great time here. I've come here to take my mind off things for a bit, to have a bit of a break from the heat, because at home right now, no matter what you do, the heat is unbearable. We can't even sleep. Well, Jane Doyle has worked as an estate agent, that's a realtor, in Finisterre, the part of northwestern France that's been hit by power outages.

7:25So far, the power has remained on where Jane is, but she described the situation as uncomfortable. It's been horrendous. I mean, I'm a state agent, so this afternoon I had an appointment at a client's house and the temperature on the car driving at 10 to 4 was 39.5 degrees and the hottest time of the day where we are here at the moment is around 5pm. So it's probably hit over 40 today. How are people dealing with it to you locally? Personally, what I've noticed, everybody's staying in. The schools are closed. People are putting the shutters down. The fans have sold out of the supermarkets. Well, completely.

8:01Yeah, so you can't get hold of them. People are just trying to take it slow, really, because you just can't do much in this heat. Just drink plenty of fluid. Unfortunately, we're reading a post in France, obviously deaths from people swimming in rivers and lakes, which is really sad. You, I think, have got dogs, haven't you? So presumably the weather doesn't stop them needing walks. How have you coped with that? We've been walking the dogs about half past seven in the morning and the temperature then is probably around about 22, 24 degrees. So at least they have a walk in the morning and then in the evening, so probably around about 10 o 'clock at night.

8:36And how are you keeping them cool in the day? It's really hard. I mean, I live in a stone lingerie, so I'm probably quite lucky because it's granite stone and we can live all on the ground floor and we've got tiled floors. For the dogs, it's okay-ish, but we're just giving them lots of water, putting towels, wet towels over the head and putting fans on for them because they're big dogs with a big coat. And have you got children, if you don't mind my asking? Yeah, so his daughter lives next door in the Jeep. She's presumably never experienced anything like this before then in her life. No, nothing.

9:07And also she sees a local Breton guy, you know, obviously from France and he said he's never known temperatures like this in Brittany. He says it's just horrendous. I have to say, as an estate agent, Presumably temperatures like this might not be entirely welcome for your business either long term. Definitely, because, you know, a lot of people move to Brittany because of the microclimate and the mild climate. So supposedly we shouldn't get really hot summers or cold winters. I think it's the prolongedness of it, you know, day after day. And we've been having the hot weather probably since Sunday.

9:40I should probably ask you what preparations you're making for tonight. We're quite lucky. We have a downstairs bedroom. So we have a fan in there. The curtains are drawn. Yeah, it's just keeping hydrated, cool. Jane Doyle talking to me from Finisterre in France. Well, Zia Vesa is senior climate reporter at Politico. She's based in Brussels in Belgium. She's been examining the contrast between what happened during Europe's most recent major heat wave in August 2003 and what's been happening today. I asked her first how significant and challenging that summer had been for public health and the authorities.

10:15So the 2003 summer was brutal. It led to around 70 ,000 deaths from heat across Europe. I think it was really a wake-up call, sort of a moment of reckoning. And most European governments ended up responding in one way or another. so you know there's been introduction of heat health action plans that are these things that result in yellow orange and red warning systems like you've got in the UK as well but nevertheless we still have heat waves that result in a lot of deaths even two decades later right so the the alert system is designed to warn people I mean we've had some complaints from some people in France today saying they didn't get much notice of just how bad it was going to be.

11:04But what about kind of additional measures countries have introduced to try and build on the alerts? What happens once an alert has been signalled? Right. So that signals, for example, to emergency services that they should prepare themselves for maybe an influx of people with heat stroke so that emergency rooms are prepared. In some countries like France, for example, there's a register that vulnerable people like elderly people can register themselves in to get check-ins during a heat wave. So if the alert hits a certain level, I think it's orange, they start getting calls because elderly people living alone are particularly at risk of falling ill from heat and then doing increasingly poorly.

11:52So there's some of that. There's other ad hoc measures like some cities open cooling centres, like let's say a public library where there's air conditioning to everyone who needs it. So there's all of that. And what's missing a bit more are sort of more long term structural measures, rather than these ad hoc emergency measures that we're seeing. Is there a country in Europe, which you would say has kind of got its heat plan together most effectively? I think there's good examples from different countries. France has maybe taken the 2003 heat wave to heart most. It's got this very extensive plan.

12:36And the question is always like, do these plans also get implemented on the ground? But in theory, like there are these plans like this voluntary register and so on. There's some good examples in Spain, for example, where the government has placed a lot of emphasis on protecting workers from heat waves, for example, forcing employers to modify working hours for outdoor workers if it gets too hot. And there's a lot of cities, like for example, Brussels, where I live, that have started massive tree planting programs because we know that trees help to cool the city. Because the experts are telling us these heat waves are going to become more frequent in the coming years.

13:19This one is clearly, what, two months ahead of where the one was in 2003. And presumably, therefore, it raises concerns that the high temperatures experience now may just be a taste of what's come more frequently and perhaps later in this year. We know that scientists have an agreement that not only will heat waves become more frequent, are more likely to occur, but also that they'll get hotter the more we warm the planet by burning fossil fuels. That's Zia Weza, senior climate reporter at Politico, talking to NewsHour here on the BBC World Service.

14:14Coming up later this NewsHour, new research shows sperm whales communicate with regional accents. We'll be hearing from a scientist who studied these so-called dialects of animals. Sperm whales' social sounds are stereotyped patterns of clicks. And what we showed by recording a lot of these in different parts of the Mediterranean is that actually, whereas we previously thought that all of the Mediterranean had one vocal dialect. In actual fact, there's a subgroup that live in the east that have developed their own version of that dialect that's distinctively modified from it. More on that story in about 10 minutes' time.

14:46Our headlines this hour, red heat alerts are in place across a number of countries in Western Europe as temperatures continue to break records. And Colombia's socialist presidential candidate Ivan Cepeda has conceded the tightly fought election to his right-wing rival Abelardo de la Espriella.

15:14I'm Sean Lay live in London and this is NewsHour. Every navigator needs a route map. Now we have one for the Milky Way. The Euclid telescope operated by the European Space Agency has taken photographs which have just been released. Professor Catherine Haymans is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. She's based in Edinburgh. And I asked her what we can see in these new images. This is an absolutely gorgeous image, well worth a quick image search for Euclid Milky Way. You are going to be staring into the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy. And if you're not in a position to image search right now, let me describe it to you.

15:51So it kind of looks like, you know, somebody's just thrown glitter across the cosmos. This thing is teeming with stars, 60 million stars in one image. And you can see these bright blue stars. These are young baby stars. There are red, older, deader stars in there. But the defining feature of this image is this kind of swirling, golden, cloudy fuzziness. And that is the gas and the dust that's at the heart of our galaxy. And you can zoom in on the image and you'll see some of these clouds are brightly lit up. These are nebulae that are creating brand new stars. And some of the other clouds are really sort of dark and looming.

16:34And these are cold gas clouds that are sort of blocking out the light from everything behind them. But gravity is pulling them together, heating them up. And in the future, new stars will be forming there as well. And it's an absolutely gorgeous image to look at. And the first time we've been able to look into the centre of our Milky Way on this large scale, thanks to the European Space Agency Euclid Telescope. Now, why is it so much better? I mean, for example, we had the Hubble Telescope taking a lot of photographs of this kind. What makes this better, more useful from your point of view? So what's really special about Euclid is it has this really wide view.

17:10So this patch of sky that we're looking at here, I want you to imagine you're holding your arm outstretched and you've got your two fingers pointed up. So this patch of sky is about the size of your two fingernails and a bit of the top of your finger. I'm doing that as we speak to get some idea of scale. Thank you. Try this at home if you're listening. So you might think that's a small patch of sky, but in astronomy terms, that's a big patch of sky. Now, Euclid managed to do that in a day. It would have taken 270 times longer to do that with the Hubble Space Telescope. And that's just because Euclid's got this really wide view of the universe.

17:46And because it's up above the atmosphere, above the Earth's atmosphere, which kind of makes everything kind of blurred out when we look with our telescopes from the ground, we can resolve all of the details of the stars in this dense region of our own Milky Way galaxy. In the last few minutes or so we've got stars, does that mean planets too? Absolutely, yeah. So on average, there's one planet for every star. Now, of course, there are some stars with no planets and some stars like our own sun with like nine planets. or eights, depending whether you want Pluto or not. We'll save that debate for another day.

18:21We haven't got time. On average, one planet per star. So when you look at this image seeing 60 million stars, you're also seeing 60 million planets, which just makes me look at it with wonder and think, I wonder who's up there staring back and wondering what we are doing down here. That's Professor Catherine Haymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, on the new images just released of the Milky Way.

18:47Now to a scandal in England's National Health Service and a report that has delivered a damning verdict on maternity care. Current and former members of staff at the Queen's Medical Centre and City Hospital in Nottingham gave evidence to the inquiry by Donna Ockenden, one of the country's most senior midwives, into the treatment given to 2 ,500 families over 13 years. The NHS Trust involved has been accused of delivering poor care and then covering up failings by its staff during patients' pregnancy and childbirth. Let's hear from Natalie Needon. Natalie's son Cooper died the day after he was born.

19:23The details, as you might expect, are distressing. Cooper was born via induction at just over 37 weeks. The pregnancy and the birth were relatively normal until they broke my waters and then they struggled to get heart tracings of Cooper. He was born very blue and lifeless. He didn't cry. We said to the midwife, like, he hasn't woken up and he's not really made a sound, he hasn't moved. And she was just like, oh, he's fine. He was just born very quickly. He just doesn't quite know that he's here yet. And obviously we referenced it again the following morning when he had his newborn check that he'd still not fed, he'd still not woken up.

20:07and they just kept dismissing my concerns. So we took Cooper home, again, tried to feed him, tried to get him to wake up and have some sort of response. We failed. Me and my husband had a discussion over whether we would take him back to the hospital and we made the decision that because they'd told us that until Cooper hadn't fed for 48 hours, they wouldn't intervene, we thought the best plan was to just keep trying through the night and speak to the midwife when they come out in the morning. And we never made it that far. My husband woke up at about quarter to six in the morning and found Cooper dead in his Moses basket.

20:45Well, I asked her health correspondent, Dominic Hughes, whether Natalie Needham's experience was typical of what other mothers and their partners had faced in Nossium. Yeah, sadly, Sean, that was a very distressing story, but one that we heard repeated, We have heard repeated over and over again over the course of nearly four years that this inquiry has been sitting this review. So what we heard today from Donna Ockenden, who's a very senior, respected midwife. She delivered a very clear but really devastating critique of terrible failures in both compassion and care that have blighted the lives of hundreds and hundreds of families in Nottingham.

21:29Now, the numbers are quite shocking. A total of 260 babies were harmed or died as a result of failings in care. Six mothers also died. There were 116 instances of women suffering potentially avoidable harm. The review laid out what went wrong with really quite sort of chilling clarity, really. Women and families weren't listened to. That led to missed opportunities to prevent harm. There was what was described as a toxic workplace culture that prevented staff from speaking up. They tried to raise concerns but were either ignored or bullied. Staffing pressures meant that services were in what were described as crisis mode.

22:13And this is really perhaps most disturbing. Over a period of years, there were repeated failures by senior managers to act on a series of reviews, six reviews between 2016 and 2018 and other warning signs that clearly told them what was going so badly wrong in their in their hospitals. So managers knew that there were problems. They had been alerted to it. They knew what was going wrong, but they failed to act. Given that, is it possible that this report will lead to potentially legal action against individuals who may have made some of the decisions or failed to make decisions as a result of earlier warnings?

22:56Honestly, having seen what has happened with previous trusts that have faced problems like this, I mean, I cast my mind back to 2015, when there was a very similar collapse in maternity services at the Morecambe Bay Trust, also in the in the northwest of England. The police launched an inquiry, as they have done this time into this trust, but it never resulted in individuals facing charges. it is much more likely that the body itself, the trust, health trust itself, might face some charges. That's Dominic Hughes there on the scandal and the Ockenden inquiry report. Just some news on a story developing this hour.

23:36US President Donald Trump and Mark Ruta, the Secretary General of NATO, are holding a joint news conference at the White House now. If there are important news lines coming out of it, we'll report them on this programme in the next half hour. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his country's top diplomat, has stressed to Gulf allies that Washington will not do anything to jeopardize their security as it tries to make a permanent peace deal with Iran. He was speaking in Kuwait after concerns that the deal had been too soft.

24:15How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the U.S. has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:47Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a non-partisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market.