Climate 2026: Record Heat, Tens of Thousands Dead, Mass Evacuations

0:00Europe is baking in its fourth heatwave of the summer, while much of the US is still locked in its own heatwave. Yeah, I looked at the forecast for Death Valley, California. It's probably quite hot. I've been there. It was hot. 125 Fahrenheit. That's 53 Celsius for this weekend. But you don't need to be in the desert to get that kind of really extreme, appalling, dangerous temperatures. Across the US, 70 million people will experience temperatures of up to 105 Fahrenheit, 40 Celsius at the moment. We know, of course, what's driving this. It's the climate crisis caused by burning huge amounts of fossil fuels.

0:36But this episode, what we're looking at is how in this climate changed era, the pattern of heat waves has changed. So we'll be looking at things like the wildfires currently burning in Europe. We'll also be looking at a method of cooling city neighbourhoods. From New Scientist, this is the world, the universe and us. I'm Dr. Rowan Hooper. And I'm Dr. Penny Sarchet. We're joined today by reporters Michael LePage and Alec Loon. Welcome both. Hello. Hey, guys. Yeah, let's start with this latest heat dome over Europe. It's an omega block, which is a kink in the jet stream shaped like the Greek letter omega.

1:10And Alec, it is tempting to suggest that these kinks that we're getting are getting more common because of climate change. But as with a lot of these things, we can't say that for sure, can we? Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to say is just that these kinks, they do cause longer heat waves. This research that came out recently found that there are these two jet stream patterns. One is this omega blocking, this omega shaped big loop in the jet stream that essentially allows a big anti-cyclonic clear skied high pressure system to just sit over Europe and allow the sun to just bake the continent.

1:48And the other is a northward shift in the jet stream where the jet stream goes way north of Europe, and then that allows a lot of hot air to come up from Africa, essentially. Both these patterns, they've been linked to especially long heat waves, 10 days, two weeks, even more. But yeah, whether they're happening more frequently with climate change is a big debate. Essentially, we understand that the jet stream is shifting northward in the wintertime. That's been proven, but it's not clear what the jet stream is doing in the summertime. In the summertime, you have heating in the Arctic, you have heating at the equator.

2:30The gradient, the difference between those two centers of temperature is decreasing, essentially, as the world warms up, which would suggest a weaker jet stream, but it's not clear that it would shift the jet stream. Long story short, researchers disagree. Most are not willing to say that these patterns are becoming more frequent. But certainly, you know, that it remains a possibility that they could start to be seen more frequently. But despite that uncertainty, there are some things that we can be sure of. The hot seasons are starting earlier. We definitely felt that this year, right? Heat stress at night is getting worse.

3:07We've talked before about tropical nights and how horrible those are. And also the heat waves when they come, they're lasting longer. Yeah. When you think of a heat wave, it's essentially can be caused by one of two things. The first one is what we just talked about, some stuff like omega blocking, these different atmospheric patterns, differences in atmospheric circulation, right? They can bring this anti-cyclonic weather that promotes hot weather, heat waves. But also, there's just rising temperatures. When you have global warming going on, temperatures are going up everywhere. That means that that background temperature is just that much higher, which means that you're already in a place from which a heat wave can develop more easily.

3:50So just the mere fact of global warming of temperatures rising means that we are seeing more frequent, more intense and longer heat waves just due to that alone. And then the atmospheric circulation question remains an open question. Michael, we talked recently about the impact of the climate crisis on our food and how that's going to really start affecting our food supply. But that's just really one of the problems, isn't it? Yes, there's so many impacts of these sort of longer, more extreme heat waves. Food's obviously a big one. The other that we're seeing at the moment is when it gets hotter, the vegetation dries out, that makes wildfires more likely.

4:31It also makes them more likely to get worse. And of course, we're seeing that in Spain and France with hundreds of thousands of people being evacuated and some deaths. And also even in Scotland and the Cairngorms, we're And then, of course, the wildfires are bad enough in themselves and can do all that direct damage to the landscape and harm people in their homes as well. But then there's smoke from the wildfires, the air pollution, which is harming people's health and having knock-on effects. There's tourism, which has been affected, and that's going to have these knock-on economic impacts. We've seen sort of Bordeaux being affected in France, and that could possibly affect the wine industry there, because apparently smoke from wildfires can be absorbed by some grapes and sort of taint it and cause problems.

5:19Wow, so even if the vineyard themselves isn't burnt by a fire, like these huge smoke clouds can taint the wine. Yes, apparently none of the vineyards have actually burnt directly yet, but there is this worry about the smoke affecting the quality of the harvest. and apparently you can't actually tell until you've made the wine and tasted it. So that's a major one. And then, of course, in these areas where we're having more wildfires, there's obviously going to be issues with home insurance and getting insurance against fires and premiums are going to go up. So there are just so many impact after impact after impact.

5:55Because we think about insurance when about flood risk, but haven't really thought about it with fire risk as well. But of course, yeah, so that's yet another issue. And about those fires in Europe, so far this year, fires have caused more destruction in France than at any time there since the Second World War. And Spain has also had record wildfire destruction. But one thing that people may not know about wildfires is that they can actually create their own almost self-driving weather systems. Alec? Yeah, we saw in France this weekend, for the first time ever in that country, they registered what's called a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, which is also known as a fire cloud.

6:38It is essentially a thunderstorm that forms over a wildfire. What happens is wildfires are very hot. They can reach over 1 ,000 degrees Celsius at the center of them, and that heats the air and sends a plume of hot air, smoke, and moisture up into the atmosphere that rises like one of these big thunderheads that you see when a thunderstorm comes. And those thunderheads can reach the stratosphere, actually, similar to a small volcanic eruption in terms of how much smoke they can put in the atmosphere. But they also, yes, create their own weather system. So that rising hot air is pulling in air to replace it from around the wildfire, which greatly increases the winds.

7:25So it's accelerating the winds around the wildfire. Then although these storm systems, they do drop rainfall, but typically those raindrops don't actually reach the ground because they evaporate in the hot air before they reach the ground. However, there's also lightning, and the lightning does tend to reach the ground and start spot fires. Meanwhile, the winds are blowing embers in front of the main fire, so there's all these additional fires starting up around the main fire because of this new weather system. All of that intensifies the fire, which intensifies that rising hot air, which intensifies the cloud in a firestorm feedback.

8:06And so it's a super dangerous weather system. It's incredibly unpredictable because you can have winds high in the atmosphere changing the direction of the fire unpredictably. It can lead to deaths. It's basically impossible to stop. And that's what they're starting to see in France. This happens in North America, in Russia, in Australia, but it's been very rare in Europe. And now because Europe's getting bigger wildfires, it's starting to happen in Europe. It is terrifying to see that massive thunderhead like that. But about unpredictability, one thing I wanted to ask about is the kind of political response to this.

8:46And obviously it's an emergency, especially in Spain and France, a massive emergency at the moment. The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, said this climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have long warned all of Spain and Europe about. And that seemed to me like a little bit of an excuse. He was trying to make an excuse saying, oh, we didn't know this was coming. We've been caught out. I wonder what you made of that. Well, there have been so many warnings about more wildfires, you know, more heat and more wildfires. So I don't think anyone can claim they haven't been warned.

9:21Whether these are exceeding the levels projected, I think I've certainly reported on studies that said in some parts of the world, including Europe heat waves are exceeding the sort of projections from you know a few few years back one of the reasons for that could be what Alec was was talking about with the changes in the jet stream but obviously we can't be sure of that so if the heat waves are more extreme it makes sense that the wildfire risk would be a bit worse too but I'm not aware of any studies looking specifically at that and of course wildfires there's so much complexity in wildfires because is they're happening in human managed landscapes in Europe.

9:58You know, we're changing the landscape. We've built cities and farms and we're managing that landscape. And that obviously has a huge impact on where the wildfires start and how bad they get. The climate crisis is clearly contributing to this. But there's also a human factor, right? As Michael's mentioning, there's some research coming out that finds that these wildfires may be getting less common in Europe because essentially there's been better management. But at the same time, because of the climate crisis, when the fires do start up and when they do get big, they're much more likely to get out of control.

10:32But that's something we can respond to. And one thing that has been talked about is the use of controlled burns. In places like North America, where there are a lot of wildfires and there have been, you know, for forever, essentially, and of course they are increasing. But one of the things that, you know, that North American indigenous groups have done traditionally is controlled burns to kind of take out the brush and low level vegetation so that those can't fuel these wildfires, which then get really big and burn the big trees. So, you know, Europe could take a page out of that book and do more essentially controlled burns to suppress the brush and reduce the chance that these wildfires get so big that you can't stop them anymore, that they create their own weather system with a fire cloud or what have you.

11:20Because there is a connection. I'm going to bring in some plant biology here, obviously. The ecosystem in the Mediterranean traditionally throughout evolution has been a fire dominated ecosystem. And there's loads of similarities with the vegetation that you get in California and also southwestern Australia. So these are ecosystems that evolved for fire. And as Alec was saying, as we get better at suppressing and managing that, it does sort of build up the kind of burning potential. So that makes a lot of sense. Time for a quick break. The idea that gut microbes can affect our minds was long met with scepticism, but no more.

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12:26know a browser but Gemini and Chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks Gemini and Chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no place like Chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus okay so we're talking about adaptations then what can we do in this heat accelerated future. And Alec, one thing you've been looking into this week is an adaptation that cities can use to cool themselves down.

13:02And this is really important. We've talked before, the June heat wave alone is estimated to have killed 20 ,000 people across Europe. So adaptation preventing heat deaths is of critical importance right now. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, people immediately think, oh, well, Europe's getting hotter, hotter, another heat wave is hitting Europe right now. We need to install air conditioning. Air conditioning is still rare in Europe. Something like one in four, one in five Europeans have air conditioning. That's it. So people, of course, immediately think of air conditioning, but that can be expensive.

13:38That's a lot of retrofitting of air conditioning. And it actually worsens the problem, right? Because you need a lot of energy to run that air conditioning. and when your home is being cooled by the air conditioning, it's ejecting that hot air outside of your home, which is worsening the urban heat island effect. It's worsening the heat that's going on that's necessitating that air conditioning. So one idea that's gaining some more traction is district cooling. And this is basically based on an old idea, district heating, which goes as far back as the Roman Empire. basically you have some sort of a furnace or boiler heating water and then you pump that water through pipes to other buildings around.

14:21So you kind of centralize the heating, right? Well, what if we also centralize the cooling and you have a chiller plant in a centralized location and then you're pumping cold water around to different buildings? And this is actually very common in North America. A lot of universities and hospitals, you know, they have networks of buildings. they already have district heating in many, many cases. And also in many cases, they have district cooling systems where they're pumping the cold water around. But Europe only has about 200 district cooling networks, mostly in Sweden and France. So this could be a huge opportunity to cool buildings in a way that's more energy efficient and in some cases cheaper than air conditioning.

15:04So, you know, we've got the four and five people in Europe who don't have air conditioning are currently trying to figure out whether they should get it. Would this actually be more sensible, more efficient? So it kind of depends on the local context, because it's very expensive to install a district cooling system. You have to essentially dig up the ground and lay all these pipes. But in some places, there are already district heating systems. In London, there are district heating systems. Paris, other cities already have district heating systems in some cases. And in that case, you could more easily lay pipes for a district cooling system.

15:43So that would reduce that installation cost, which is the kind of the high upfront cost. And then you could start reaping the benefits of the lower operation cost. Because what district cooling can do is you can take electricity at night during off-peak periods and use the electricity then when it's cheap to produce the cooling, to cool that water, to sometimes even produce ice. some some district cooling plants actually freeze water into ice so do that at night and then in the in the daytime when the heat rises that's when you actually use it you pump out that cold water when the electricity would be more expensive if you were doing that if you were generating the cooling then right so you can save a lot of money that way but it's only good where district heating networks already exist so you can reduce that upfront cost and there's actually a really cool technology which is kind of the next generation the next step in this technology that's called ambient loop technology.

16:38What it basically is is a combination of both the district heating and the district cooling. So you have the pipes running around from the centralized plant to the different buildings, but instead of hot or cold water, they're pumping water that's basically neutral, basically air temperature. And then each building has a heat pump, which takes that water, and then if it's in the winter summertime, that heat pump converts that water, takes the heat out of that water and heats the home with it. If it's in the summertime, the same heat pump takes that water and uses it to cool the home. And it's much more efficient than heat pumps that use air because the water is already basically at kind of ambient temperature.

17:19It's not like it's negative 10 degrees outside and you're bringing that up to 20 degrees in your home with air. You're actually taking you know, 5, 10 degree water and bringing that up to 20 degrees in your home or the opposite of the cooling. So much more energy efficient. Because there's quite a lot of discussion I've seen at the moment about whether like new build developments, housing developments should all be putting in aircon as standard. But it sounds like maybe these kind of new technologies and these kind of more centralized, organized things are the way to go. Yeah, yeah. But no one is really taking charge of this.

17:50I would love to see, look, politicians at the moment, all they're doing is reacting to the terrible emergency that they're in, especially in France and Spain. But surely this is an opportunity now when everyone is undeniably suffering in heat waves to say we need to roll out this program of planning better for the future, but also going to net zero. You know, everyone's still afraid of saying this. And, you know, if this isn't an opportunity to do it, what are we waiting for now? You know, bring back home insulation schemes to make leaky homes more more resistant and hold heat and hold cooling better.

18:35Well, I think we need to redouble our effort on every front. We need to get the price of electricity down. We need to generate more renewable electricity. Do we need to use that to heat our homes with heat pumps and sort of get rid of gas and use heat pumps instead? We need to switch to electric vehicles faster. We need to accelerate all these efforts. But it's not happening. And it's quite frightening seeing that as the impacts ramp up, the action is going down. But it seems like it could be a politically safe time to do it because you could stand up from any party and say, this is the sixth or seventh year in a row that we've had record-breaking temperatures globally.

19:19It's undeniable. This is the time to do something about it. You know, this is 2024 in the UK, the warmest year on record. 2025, the hottest since we started recording since 1884. You know, it's safe for politicians to say, or you'd think so, right? Well, they're so out of step with the public because for a while now we've had surveys showing that people, generally speaking, the majority believe climate change is real and they want to see action. And then we're still in this position where net zero was still this kind of scary political football. And businesses want it. Yeah, businesses want that direction as well and that has to come from government.

19:55Well, you say it's undeniable, but there are still people denying it, amazingly enough. That's all for this episode. Thanks to our guests Alec Loon and Michael LePage and thanks to you for listening. And do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out. Bye for now.