Europe swelters in 'heat dome', and Martin Rees on aliens

0:00Lord Martin Rees:Lapis Lazuli. Pliny the Elder describes me as a fragment of the starry firmament. My color, ultramarine, a deep blue flecked with gold, has led many to believe that I am the gem of the gods. I have traveled all around the world, and have even given rise to one of the oldest trade routes. Yet for a long time, my provenance was a mystery. Listen now to Voice of Jewels, a podcast by Le Colle, School of Jewelry Arts, supported by Van Cleefen Arpels.

0:49Sonia Shah:Hello, welcome to the Naked Scientist podcast, the show that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine. and I'm Chris Smith. Coming up, Europe smashes monthly temperature records again with schools and national infrastructure struggling. But what's driving this searing heat? Also, a landmark study finds the HPV vaccine is remarkably effective in preventing cervical cancer in young women but falling uptake rates are threatening to jeopardise the results. And life, Jim, but not as we know it. Why, the former astronomer royal Martin Rees is a staunch believer in aliens, but not of the little green man variety.

1:31Sonia Shah:He'll tell us why.

1:40Sonia Shah:Our Australian and American friends may well raise a wry smile at the fact that Europe has been struggling with record-breaking June temperatures in the high 30s and early 40s Celsius. But most of the northern part of the continent, at least, is not well equipped to deal with this sort of heat. Schools have decided to close their doors because of a lack of air conditioning. People have been advised not to travel on public transport in many areas. And in parts of France, dozens have drowned after swimming in rivers and lakes. The temperatures are being driven by what's called a heat dome, a patch of high pressure that's settled over Europe.

2:16Sonia Shah:The phenomenon is caused by a distortion in the jet stream, the narrow band of air circulating westwards about five miles above the planet in a big ring around the northern hemisphere. This is buckled into an omega shape, enclosing and immobilising a patch of atmosphere at its centre that is now working as a pressure cooker. The former BBC and Met Office weather presenter Peter Gibbs joined us from continental Europe.

2:40Lord Martin Rees:Well, I'm actually sitting on the steps outside my son's apartment in Amsterdam. I can say it's just as hot as it has been in the UK. Expecting 38 degrees here tomorrow at time of recording, which is really not fun at all because it's accompanied by high humidity. I mean, Chris, what we are seeing across Europe at the moment is actually unprecedented. Certainly for the UK, we've broken the all-time UK June record. Temperatures up to 36 degrees, again, at time of recording. beat almost to the day 50 years on the previous record that was set in the notorious 1976 heat wave which yeah i do go back that far as a teenager at the time i remember it well france hottest day on record this week when you average over the country as a whole three consecutive days over 44 degrees so these are extraordinary things and you know irony of irony uh going back to uk OK, in London, events at London Climate Action Week had to be cancelled or moved online because of the heat.

3:43Lord Martin Rees:What's actually driving this, Peter? It's a thing called a heat dome, which I suppose almost does what it says on the tin. It's a big dome of hot air which sits over a region and just doesn't move on. It's associated with an area of high pressure in the atmosphere. High pressure means there's a lot of atmosphere above you. So more atmosphere above you means more pressure on the ground, just like deeper water means a higher pressure down on the seabed. And that traps the heat. And if that high pressure doesn't move for days and days on end because the jet stream's moved away and it's gone up north, then at this time of year, when the days, of course, are much longer than the nights, then you just keep accumulating heat.

4:30Sonia Shah:normally when we have intense heating of a patch of the earth's surface this causes the air above to get hot and it spreads out it expands it rises and you get low pressure which pulls in nice cool air and this then also inevitably brings some unsettled weather so why should an area of the earth's surface getting really hot stay hot why does the high pressure stay there locked in over that land mass and intensify the effect like is happening now?

5:02Lord Martin Rees:Because the way the weather pattern is set up at the moment, it is all down to the jet stream. The jet stream sometimes goes very loopy, like a meandering river. If you can imagine sitting in the base of one of those loops, it's almost like an eddy within the flow, which is cut off from the rest of the atmospheric flow. Normally, we're seeing weather systems coming in from the Atlantic, and that's what brings our more changeable weather across Europe, it moves on. You might get a few days of this, but then the next Atlantic system comes in and moves on. When the jet stream loops like this and loops away towards the north, it just leaves an area of atmosphere which is stranded, left behind.

5:43Lord Martin Rees:So you just don't get that effect. You're right, you know, if you continue to heat air, the pressure will gradually reduce to some extent, but it's the upper air processes going on that are keeping that in place, more air being fed in at the top, if you like, and sort of pressing down on the air below. You can exaggerate this if you've got dry ground, for example, that feeds into it. If the ground's quite wet, some of that sun's energy has to be used to evaporate the moisture from the ground first of all. So that takes some of the energy out and leaves less to directly heat the air above.

6:16Sonia Shah:How do we break the cycle or how does this tend to end? What does the aftermath look like?

6:21Lord Martin Rees:It only ends when the weather decides to move on. So when that loop in the jet stream eventually runs out of steam and things further upstream, so you're looking across the Atlantic, you're looking across North America, you might even be looking all the way across into the Pacific for the thing that changes the pattern, sort of ripples the jet stream and that ripple then feeds on around the northern hemisphere and eventually nudges things on. So we have to wait for that pattern to change. Fortunately, it looks like that is going to happen as we go through the next few days over the weekend into the early part of the following week.

7:00Lord Martin Rees:Things will move on, it'll push that warm air out of the way. But until then, there's no reason for anything to change.

7:06Sonia Shah:Does climate change have anything to do with this? As in, are these sorts of perturbations in the jet stream that enable this island of high pressure to form and bake Europe like this. Do the models suggest that this is linked to climate change? And if it is, is it therefore going to become more common as temperatures go up?

7:26Lord Martin Rees:A heat wave now is going to be hotter regardless than it was 50, 100 years ago because we've got more heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, probably around three degrees hotter than it would have been back in 1976 for example and looking ahead you know if things don't change it's going to get hotter still i was at an event presenting an event earlier in the week which showed a met office forecast that had been done for a fairly typical extreme heat wave in 2056 so 30 years hence this was to tie in with the anniversary of the 1976 heat wave and looking at the possibilities there. And this was assuming that we continue on much the same trajectory in terms of missions, perhaps backslide a bit, which of course is something that is tending to happen at the moment.

8:22Lord Martin Rees:And you were looking at a nine-day stretch of 40 degree temperatures in the UK with a top temperature of around about 45 degrees. Those are Middle Eastern sort of temperatures and to think of that in a UK context it's really hard to understand and to imagine.

8:42Sonia Shah:The thing is though this isn't a one-off and as you point out it has happened before and not long after I was born we had that summer of 76 when we did have these sorts of extreme temperatures so it could have happened it can happen but why did it happen back then was that the same mechanism back then or was it something different then no it was pretty much the same

9:04Lord Martin Rees:mechanism it was drought fed into it the ground was extremely dry after a very prolonged drought which had sort of started 18 months previously so that was one of the factors yeah we had a 15 day stretch where the temperature reached 32 degrees somewhere in the uk through that whole two week period. So for the time, it was a really extreme event. When you look as a whole and look at the temperature anomalies, i.e. what the temperatures were, the departure from average, the UK and the far northwest of Europe were a little tiny red blob of heat in the midst of a much, much cooler globe. It was a very, very localized event.

9:47Lord Martin Rees:You look at something similar now and you'll see vast areas of the globe covered in red. It's not an isolated event anymore. So think of 76 as something that was at the limit of what could be achieved at that time in the UK. Think of it now as something that's becoming a very normal occurrence for a UK summer.

10:11Sonia Shah:Perish the thought. Peter Gibbs there. New research suggests that 12 and 13 year old children who are vaccinated against human papillomavirus or HPV now have a near zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before they reach their 30th birthday. The study, which has just been published in The Lancet, shows that deaths from the disease have plummeted since school-aged girls and more recently boys have been offered the vaccine. But uptake rates have dropped dramatically in the last few years, meaning these wins might only be short-lived. Study author Peter Sassini is at Queen Mary University of London.

10:48Lord Martin Rees:The headline finding is that there has been a dramatic fall in the number of young women dying from cancer of the cervix. And in particular, under the age of 25, there have been no deaths in the last five years. And that coincides exactly with the introduction of HPV vaccination.

11:08Sonia Shah:And what would that number have been had we not had that vaccination? If it's all down to the vaccine, what difference has it made?

11:16Lord Martin Rees:So the numbers are reasonably small. Under the age of 25, we think there would be 23, 24 cancers. By age 30, we think we've already seen a reduction in 200 deaths, that sort of thing. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. as these women age and cervical cancer would have become more common we could be saving between 800 and 2 ,500 deaths per year.

11:43Sonia Shah:It's not just deaths though is it because of course people are picked up with the disease and hopefully treated before they die from it presumably that outcome is happening less because we're preventing this problem.

11:57Lord Martin Rees:That's right. We'd shown before that there'd been an 80%, 90 % fall in the incidence of the cancer, and the number of women getting cancer. There was a slight worry that the very women who were dying from the cancer because they were neither screened nor vaccinated. And so this shows that actually it is working at a population level. Because we have very good screening programs, we're preventing a lot of deaths, but we find some cancers very early. and we weren't just preventing those cancers we were also preventing the cancers that were actually killing women.

12:30Sonia Shah:Have we narrowed down yet when the best window of opportunity to go in with the vaccine is because historically and as one other virologist put it to me once you've got to get in early before a person's sexual debut and they're exposed to the virus or the impact is more limited. Do we have a clearer picture on that now or is that still the case that if the ship has sailed so to speak then perhaps for that person it might be too late and they just need to accept that there may be a higher risk yeah so these particular vaccines only work in terms

13:04Lord Martin Rees:of preventing infection once you've already had an infection the vaccine will not help so very important to ensure that we're giving it before people become sexually active so that's why we target 12, 13-year-olds. There's still, of course, benefit, and we've seen that in the data. So when the vaccination was first introduced, it was offered up to the age of 18, and those people have benefited less because more of them would already have been exposed to the virus before they were vaccinated, and also because a higher proportion took up the vaccine. So if we can get at young ages is much, much better.

13:51Lord Martin Rees:Because we've been using the vaccine for quite a long time, the virus has become much less common in the population. So there is probably still more of an opportunity to vaccinate older teens who probably haven't been exposed because the virus is just less common. And so we've seen hugely falling rates of vaccination across the UK. And there's an opportunity, I think, to not only to try and improve that in the 12 and 13 year olds, but to do a catch up campaign in the older teens.

14:29Sonia Shah:The individuals that you've taken into account with this study, they would have been a legacy of when this campaign first kicked in, in about the late noughties. What were the uptake rates then for vaccination and what are the rates now you're saying there's been a fall and therefore do we think we're going to see a departure away from this brilliant outcome of no cancers we're going to start to see it creeping back in potentially the vaccination program was

14:56Lord Martin Rees:introduced in 2008 and from then until covid we were getting 88 89 90 percent vaccine uptake because of covid and school closures it was a bit of a disaster for a year but since then it hasn't really gone back to the rates we're seeing and so nationally it's just under 75 percent in london i think it's 61 percent so really falling uptake of this vaccine and yes if something isn't done about that if we don't succeed in getting the vaccine uptake back up to where it was we'll then start seeing the rates go back again do we know why the rates

15:37Sonia Shah:are down and in whom?

15:39Lord Martin Rees:When the rates were around 90 % they were really good all over the country and in all sectors and we had shown previously that the vaccination campaign was succeeding in dramatically reducing cervical cancer rates both in the most deprived and the least deprived parts of the country. Undoubtedly now the vaccine uptake is lowest in some of the more deprived communities. Attitudes to vaccination are sometimes ethnically linked. A lot of religious groups seem to be very reluctant. There's an extreme of anti-vaccine, but there's also a much bigger vaccine hesitancy. And I think we need better communication.

16:25Lord Martin Rees:There's a lot of misinformation. This is an incredibly safe vaccine. Tens of millions of people have received the vaccine worldwide and as we're seeing we're already saving lives from this and lives of young people you know taken away in their 20s so really important people who are sort of thinking about it you know realize that actually this is one of the best things you can do for your children in terms of their health peter sassini there hannah i just van mode you for dinner obsessed i'm spending it right now on the lip gloss that's been sitting in my cart. What do you mean spending it right now?

17:04Lord Martin Rees:You can instantly spend your balance with the Venmo debit card or when you pay with Venmo at checkout. Stop. Say more. More exactly. The more you do with Venmo, the more you get, like earning up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash. Get the Venmo debit card or checkout online. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max$100 per month. See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants, the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A.

17:59Sonia Shah:for audio and video productions. This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me Chris Smith. Still to come Lord Martin Rees who served as Astronomer Royal tells me why he believes in aliens but not necessarily of the ET variety, robotic entities. But first you might know by now that we've teamed up with the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute to unpack the very latest in the research and control of the disease and its vector, the mosquito, widely regarded as the world's most dangerous animal owing to the death toll it exacts. We're calling these Mosquito Minutes and as part of this series I've been speaking to Sonia Shah who's the author of The Fever how malaria has ruled humankind for 500 ,000 years about what was known of this disease and how people have attempted to overcome it with different methods.

18:48Sonia Shah:This includes bed nets home modifications and later dichloro-diphenyl trichloroethane otherwise known as the now globally banned insecticide, DDT.

19:00Lord Martin Rees:Malaria, the name is malaria, bad air, right? Italian for bad air. People knew to avoid these bad airs. So for example, in ancient Rome, they would build their villas high up in the hills, so they wouldn't be exposed to the malarias. They built their courtyards in the inside, these interior courtyards, so the windows faced inside rather than outside. So, So, you know, there was ways in which kind of dim understanding of the basic ecology kind of probably did protect people because people tried to avoid wetlands and places where mosquitoes breed.

19:34Sonia Shah:So there was evidence that people were voting with their feet and just staying away from where they knew this disease appeared to be prevalent. And that was their protection. But presumably, once they did heed the word of the scientists and the connection was made, they then realized what their adversary was, the mosquito. So when did the things we would recognize in the modern era as defenses like bed nets and so on, when did that begin to come in?

19:59Lord Martin Rees:Well, I think bed nets probably predate any of this because, you know, a lot of mosquitoes are pests, right? So they're annoying even if they don't give you malaria. And so people wanted to protect themselves from mosquitoes even outside of any concern about malaria. So bed nets were something that probably went back, you know, well before malariologists figured out that it was mosquitoes that carry malaria. I mean, the thing about malarial mosquitoes was they are, among all the mosquitoes, probably not the most pesty mosquitoes. You know, they're not the ones who buzz around you really loudly and, you know, give you all these itchy bites.

20:35Lord Martin Rees:They're more the kinds that come in silently and, you know, just bite you once and you don't really notice. Right. So they're not really pests, which is a problem. This is how they succeed in giving us so much malaria.