Why is the UK feeling the heat more than ever?

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:11This country needs to get used to heatwaves and much better at handling them. This is why.

0:22How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway and in each episode of my new podcast Stuff Matters I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

0:54Hi everyone, Neil here. So how are you all getting on with the heat? Well given my accent You might have already guessed that I'm not doing brilliantly. But spare a thought for those attending London Climate Week. We have just lived through the 11 hottest years ever recorded. And today, this city and far beyond are experiencing the hottest day of the year with higher temperatures to come. London isn't just calling, it's cooking. In a delicious bit of irony, with temperatures expected to reach and perhaps even breach 40 degrees Celsius, parts of London Climate Week, the largest independent climate event in Europe, have had to be cancelled.

1:37So to train journeys, we've seen hundreds of schools closed, the national grid being pushed to its limits, and emergency departments extremely busy. And we all just need to get used to it, because we've been here before and we'll be here again. Heatwaves are part of our weather. They happen pretty much every summer. But I think what's really important to remind ourselves of here, we are seeing these events happening slightly more frequently now. And the simple reason for that is temperatures in the UK are going up by about half a degree a decade. Tom Clark is Sky's science and technology editor.

2:14Tom, first things first, it's Scotch and out there. How are you coping? I'm sweating quite a bit. Thanks a lot. I didn't take my normal bicycle ride to the train station this morning. I walked. But I am pleased to report the air conditioning on my train was working brilliantly. So when we're talking about infrastructure in a minute, it's not all bad news. I can say that much. Of course. And the same here in the This Is Why Vodcast studio. But we're not focusing on what is happening in here. What is going on outside? I mean, how are the next few days actually going to look for us all? Really hot.

2:47Yeah. And sweaty. That's the other important thing. A lot of humidity in this heat wave. And that's an important contrast to the one we had, if you remember, July 2022, when the UK broke its all-time record heat. We just passed 40 degrees in central England. That was quite dry heat. It was still cripplingly hot. Obviously, we had wildfires and things like that associated with that event. I think I'm pretty confident in saying that is much less likely a scenario here. We had a lot of thunderstorms in the hottest part of England and Wales in the run-up to this. They will have dampened that all down a bit.

3:19And we also had quite a cooler, wetter spell beforehand as well. but that does mean the humidity of the air that we're going to be experiencing is higher. And the temperatures we're going to get, it's very hard to forecast exactly how warm it will get where, but they're still looking at 39 degrees, potentially higher. And remember, this is a whole month earlier than that event we had in July. Unusual, very unusual for the UK to have a heatwave this intense in June. On the back of, let's not forget, a record May heatwave as well. where we broke May temperature records for the UK too. Let's backtrack just for a second.

3:55Okay, firstly, what is humidity and why is it making these historic temperatures even more blooming insufferable? Well, I thought this was easy, right? I thought, you know, humidity, a certain percentage, the higher it goes, then checked with actual meteorology. It's quite complicated. As air gets warmer, it can store more moisture. And in the interests of science and explaining this, not just to myself, but to everybody else, I locked myself in a heat chamber with some scientists at University of Roehampton where we jacked up the humidity in a 40 degree room and what happens basically is if the air is humid, the sweat on your skin, which is your primary way of cooling yourself down when it's hot, can't evaporate because the air is already saturated with moisture.

4:36There's nowhere for that sweat evaporation to go. How did that feel? Horrible. And the sweat was literally running off my fingertips as I was on this exercise bike into puddles on the floor. You're not cooling down. Now, you can handle that for a bit if you're reasonably fit and healthy. The issue comes, and one of the big reasons they made this a red heat warning for parts of England and Wales is because we're going to have several days, it'll be three, maybe four days, depending on how hot it is on Friday, of very above average heatwave temperatures with high humidity. And what that means is at night, when the temperatures drop down to 20, something like that, that's still really warm, but if it's humid too, you're not able to cool yourself down.

5:17You won't be able to sweat and cool overnight. If you're frail, if you have a heart condition, if you suffer from diabetes, those are things that can put real stress on your body. Over time, your core body temperature goes up. That puts a real burden on your physiology. It can be dangerous as well. And it can be very dangerous. Also, if you're somebody who works outside, if you've got a job, manual labour, something like that, again, that can be a serious health problem. And we did see, I mean, in the 1976 heat wave, we saw 28, 30 percent excess mortality during the period of that heat wave. I'm not suggesting it would be the same now.

5:49We're much better adapted than we used to be. But it is entirely reasonable to expect increased mortality related to heat because it does put stress on people's bodies. But what actually is happening here? I mean, dip your toe into the kind of the social media that Sky and others have put out around this story. And you'll get one thing in response. It's the summer. Pull yourselves together. Come on, we all expect it to get a bit sweaty and a bit hot around about this time of year. And that's absolutely reasonable. Heatwaves are part of our weather. You know, they happen pretty much every summer.

6:21I think we can all remember somewhere we didn't have a heatwave, but typically through the year, we will have heatwaves from May to September, maybe even to October. These are phenomena that happen, typically associated with area of high pressure that can't move for one reason or another. In this case, it's the jet stream that tends to keep these what are called blocking highs in a particular place. The high pressure sits there. That pressure squeezes down on the air below it. That makes it warmer in and of itself. It also means it can't move. So the temperature gradually builds. And that's called a heat dome.

6:51You might have heard of that. Right now, there is a massive heat dome sitting over all of northern Europe. We're actually on the fringes of it and it's still really hot. Look what's happening in France and Spain right now. And you'll be glad of the heat we've got here. I mean, it's dangerously hot across large parts of Northern Europe at the moment. And those are the typical sort of heatwave conditions we get. How often does this sort of thing happen? I mean, like you say, we get heatwaves every year. This is of a different order. But we have been here before. We have. And these events do happen with regularity.

7:23And people often talk about when we talk about, you know, is our climate getting worse, hotter? People hark back to 1976, you know, when it was, we had, I think it was nine continuous days above 30 degrees. is that was a significant heat wave. It was also associated with a very dry spring and then we had a very serious drought following it. Those, again, the variability of weather can conspire to make these things more or less impactful over a longer term. But I think what's really important to remind ourselves of here, we are seeing these events happening slightly more frequently now. And when they do happen, they are hotter.

7:56And there is absolutely no doubt about that second one. And the simple reason for that is temperatures in the UK are going up by about half a degree a decade. That doesn't sound like any much to me. Yeah, half a degree a decade doesn't sound like very much. But when you put these numbers into a climate model, right, the same models they use to forecast these heatwave events, what we find is if the temperature has gone up by a degree on average across the globe, it's actually slightly higher than that. Your heatwaves, because of those heat dome effects and the things I was talking about, don't just get one degree hotter.

8:28they appear to get two, three, four degrees hotter. And that's exactly what we're seeing with this current heat wave. If you model that based on 1976 conditions, you get temperatures of about what we saw, 34, 35 degrees. Now we're touching 40. So even if you've only got global warming for a degree, when the weather on top of that background warming signal conspires to give you a heat wave, it can be significantly hotter than one degree warmer. And that's exactly what we seem to be seeing happening right now. It's what we saw when we had that 40 degree temperature. And it's why they're projecting within 30 years, a heat wave like this will be given as temperatures of 45 degrees.

9:06OK, that's the science bit. Just in terms, though, of putting it into a manner in which I can understand. Climate change has not caused this heat wave, but climate change has exacerbated this heat wave. In fact, climate change is exacerbating every single major event because we are just got a slightly higher kind of baseline of temperature. Am I close? That is pretty much bang on. Exactly that. But the other thing that you have to remember here is climate change doesn't mean everything gets hotter all the time, even in one direction. Yeah, because the weather sits on top of that. So you're absolutely right.

9:39Climate change doesn't cause the heat wave to happen. That's the weather conditions. But when you put those weather conditions together, the heat wave type conditions, this heat dome thing that we're seeing over Europe, for example, yes, it will be more extreme. But it also means the heat budget for the Earth has to shuffle around somewhere that the weather puts it somewhere. We had record cold temperatures in May, for example, before that May heat wave. It was really, really cool because a lot of hot air was parked over southern Europe that would normally have been sort of more evenly shared around.

10:08So the other thing we know from the climate modelling is these extremes will also potentially quite likely become more evident. When you put more heat into the system, it doesn't just mean more hot, dry heat wave type conditions. More energy means the atmosphere can hold more moisture, hence the humidity thing we were talking about. But that also means when you have thunderstorms, storm events, they carry more moisture, more rainfall, and then you get more intense flooding, which is, again, why they talk about how the climate change, the warming, intensifies extreme weather events.

10:47How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

11:22OK, so what are the practical problems of having a prolonged period of heat like this beyond far too many adult men wearing bucket hats? There is that, definitely. Pretty much every aspect. So you're looking at infrastructure as a big one. You know, water supplies is something that's key. We already have a creaking, ageing water system. In 1976, we had that prolonged drought. We saw a real failure there. People just couldn't get the water. They nearly farmers couldn't either. It's improved quite a bit. We're much more efficient with water. We waste less water, even though we're still leaking billions of litres of it just in London every day.

11:56But we're going to need to build more reservoirs to store the water we get when we have intense rainfall to get us through those periods. But it goes to road, railway, the transformers that run our grid. They are vulnerable to overheating. And again, we are designed for an environment that is two degrees cooler than we're facing right now. the built environment, air conditioning, all that kind of stuff, your data centres, the stuff that runs our mobile phone network, they're all vulnerable to temperatures. And then you've got another very important factor is food, farming, growing stuff. How do they manage with a rapidly changing climate to continue to give us decent harvests?

12:30But just on what you just said there, we're a country that is set up for the temperature to be a couple of degrees lower. I mean, what, has everyone forgotten what's been going on over the past 10 years in terms of our climate, in terms of the heat waves that we have been experiencing here? It doesn't sound like anyone has fully grasped that we need to prepare ourselves properly for this. This is different. This is different to what I even remember from a decade ago. And it does seem remarkable to me that that is not more of a conversation point, especially given it's not like we weren't warned this was going to happen.

13:03The forecast, the predictions going of these sorts of conditions go back to the 1990s. Climate scientists are saying these are the sorts of things we're expecting. and their predictions are being borne out pretty well in terms of that modelling. I think it's now not an unreasonable thing to say the urgent question of how we're going to rapidly adapt our infrastructure to cope with these sorts of conditions. It doesn't seem to be dealt with anything like the urgency that people have been saying we need to take for at least a decade now. And the lesson that we can learn from at least parts of continental Europe is that you can change your infrastructure.

13:36But although I'd say at the same time, I mean, the southern part of Europe, But I mean, they're going to have bigger problems than the ones that they've been experiencing up till now, surely. Yes. And I think that is a much more sort of existential question. I was in Corfu a couple of years ago when they had this intense wildfires associated with heatwave. And there was a genuine conversation going on, particularly in the tourism industry, acknowledging the fact we might not be a viable tourist economy in August in 2040. because it literally will be impossibly hot. That is a legitimate question.

14:13But let's also face it, we're a highly adaptable species. If you look at how school holidays are run in hotter countries versus cooler ones, these are things we can adapt to. Questions around infrastructure and things like that, I think are more challenging because yes, you could just leave it for everyone to gradually sort of upgrade and adapt. But how much cost to society would that bring from closed schools, collapsing rail networks, etc. But do we have the£11 billion per annum that the Committee on Climate Change suggests we need to spend to adapt our society to be fit for the climate change we're going to get whether we stop producing emissions now or not?

14:53So I think there are some very serious questions around that. The Climate Change Committee that you mentioned, that was set up to provide government with kind of independent advice as to what it should be doing. And their latest report points out that if we don't sort things out, we're going to be seeing the heat, the flooding and drought as potential problems within a handful of years. So I just really struggle with the fact that we haven't seen really any senior politician, possibly with the exception of Ed Miliband, banging on about this time and time and time again. Look, it baffles me too.

15:24I mean, I've spent my entire journalistic career, basically 25 years, reporting on exactly these sorts of things. This is the future we're likely to get. These are the conditions we're going to have. If we start to spend the money now and make the investments, it will save us money and the society more pain further down the line. We have chosen not to do that. When it comes to climate adaptation, you know, the building slightly higher flood defences, more reservoirs, thinking about when you build a new piece of infrastructure or a new building, how it's going to fare in a future climate, that is starting to happen.

15:58That is now sort of built into some rules, regulations, planning requirements. But the fact that, you know, we didn't pass legislation on private housing, making it climate proof until very recently is, you know, I think people will look back and think, what on earth were we doing when we could scrap that? And unfortunately, it comes down to politics, is all I can say. It's a four or five year electoral cycle and people being afraid to make the commitments that are necessary. We did make commitments. We've made plenty of commitments. And then we scrapped them. And then we scrapped them. Actually, what we are seeing right now, I mean, you'd think given the temperature and where it is right now, if there were anyone senior in government who wanted to talk about this, this would be the perfect time.

16:39Instead, we're hearing silence other than the backing away from the commitments that we have made to net zero, backing away from the push to making this a completely carbon neutral country. All of those things you wouldn't expect politicians to be talking about. But actually, they've taken the temperature, you know, pun intended, and decided that they can get away with it. There is not an insignificant irony to the fact. For the first time, they're going to be debating in the Commons our seventh carbon budget, our next set of ambitious carbon-cutting proposals. It's always just gone through the Commons by committee before because it was voted through the Climate Change Act with cross-party support, and there's an expert committee that gives the advice, and it's like, yep, sign off, tick.

17:16This time they want to debate it. And the reason being, as you say, there is increasing voices of concern, criticism, from the centre of politics to the right over this net zero mission. and whether we should do it, whether we could afford it, etc. The irony here is they will be debating that in a potentially 39 degree heat inside this hallowed stone built, probably quite cool building without air conditioning, while the rest of us outside are dealing with melting tarmac and trains that don't run on time and having the kids with us all day because the schools are shut because we didn't build cool enough buildings for them.

17:47And it baffles me. We have been in a situation where we've been debating the best way to deliver on a net zero agenda, the best ways to adapt for climate change, with one side saying we have to go for broke, just do this, get it done. Others say, yes, but if you cripple the economy and you're going to have a backlash against it, it will actually start a process down. I have sympathy for both of those arguments. But what the latter doesn't factor in, and this is the thing that just baffles me to this day, is yes, you can talk about the impacts on the UK economy of going for broke on climate change and trying to do the things we need to both adapt and to reduce our carbon emissions.

18:28But they very rarely factor in the reality of what is the world going to be like that you will be living in. Take AI data centers, right? So one of the big arguments from Claire Cattino, who is the Shadow Energy and Climate Secretary, is that Ed Miliband's plans for net zero mean we're not going to attract data centers and give them enough power and grid access to this green grid, and we're going to fall behind in the AI race. Totally valid point. We need to stay on the ball with AI. But what use is that AI if you've got a country in which you can no longer effectively grow crops, keep your population well fed?

19:07I think when the political arguments and the number of policy wonks you can talk to about whether we should stay pumping a bit of North Sea gas just to soften the impact on the industry while we make this important transition, which will have to happen, but maybe it has to happen a bit slower. They often fail to factor in the realities of what's happening to the environment in which we live. And I think they often forget it is, and I hate to sound like a complete hippie here, but where do you think the air we breathe comes from? And AI can't make it, unfortunately. And I'm a big fan of AI, and it offers a huge amount of potential in terms of new energy solutions, growing better crops.

19:43Some of the things it can help us do on the climate mission are enormous. But if the plants you need to do that aren't growing, And if the water you need to irrigate your crops isn't falling, those are massive economic externalities, realities that you have to factor in when you're having these sorts of debates. And yet when you put your hand up in the commons or when the campaigns are on the street, they are sort of written off as zealots, hippies, you know, going a bit too far. And I'll tell you why. If you look at the amount of carbon we in this country produce recently, not historically, but recently, all of the efforts that we are making in this country to kind of reduce carbon.

20:19If the temperature stops rising, it's not going to be because of anything we have done here in the United Kingdom. We are not one of the big polluting nations. So why are we sacrificing ourselves? Why are we sacrificing our quality of life rather than spending all this money instead on persuading those who actually are the big polluters to cut back? I think that is a really valid criticism of the current net zero or what some people perceive the current net zero ambition to be. It's simply too expensive. It's going to cripple our economy. undermine our industrial growth and productivity. And it's not really going to make any difference to global emissions at all, because China and India are doing all that.

20:56And I think it's a valid point. However, what it often ignores is the realities of what the climate is going to do in response that the rest of the world is already waking up to as well. And when people say, oh, if we switch to full electrication too quickly, we're going to cripple our economy. One of the, and I think this is a reasonable argument, a bit like with the AI thing, we need to be a leader in that. If you can dominate in industries of this new energy era, they become something you can export and profit from. And also you keep up with your competitors. Europe is already, the EU is discussing radical electrification plans.

21:31Spain and France are already ahead of us in terms of electrification. And then you've got economies like China and India, which are rapidly going in that direction too. So yes, it is true, us getting our house in order doesn't do a huge amount to emissions. But it is the direction of travel. It's the way the world is going. And it is something you could base an industrial strategy around. That's Ed Miliband's argument. But, and this is another big but, politicians have only changed directions, you know, because politics is the art of the possible. And the electorate has shifted on this. I'm not saying there's been a massive spike in out and out climate change scepticism.

22:02But people are very, very sceptical of the way in which we are going about dealing with this. No one's interested anymore. And there's obviously an understandable reason for that. We are all feeling the squeeze. No one feels wealthy enough. Given that situation, certainly not sympathetic to someone who can be perceived to be telling them what to do, especially when that thing involves spending more money. And I have a lot of sympathy. An EV, I would love to buy an electric car, but I've got three kids. It's really hard to find one that's big enough that costs less than£40 ,000,£50 ,000, which is money I do not have.