Are heatwaves the new norm?

podcast, Counter-Crisis, from the Center for Disaster Protection.

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miss an episode. Hello, it's Aida here, and you're listening to the Sloan Newscast Extra, where every Thursday we talk about a story that the newsroom just can't stop thinking about. And this week, well, it's not about who will be the next Prime Minister, or the England game.

It's the heat wave. Across Europe and the UK, temperatures are in the high 30s, even in some places reaching 40 degrees. It's a record-breaking start to the summer, and not in a good way. Schools are shutting, infrastructure is failing, threat to life warnings have been issued,

and people are dying.

Rising temperatures should have come as no surprise, and yet every year, as they steadily

climb, we seem to respond not with innovative adaptation, but with shock. Why? Is it something to do less with technological capabilities, and more with a sort of cultural stubbornness? In Western Northern Europe, extreme heat is just not something we've historically had to worry

about. One of the things was for other places. In this temperate, green, and pleasant land, sunshine is supposed to be enjoyed, preferably with a drink in hand, rather than feared. So in the face of mounting evidence that that version of a British summer is set to be

replaced by a new normal of extremely hot Western European summers. What can we do to adapt? We need to discuss how we got here, and where we go next, is academic meteorologist and researcher Rob Thompson from the University of Reading. And dimple Ranna, who is the Heat Resilience Leader at Europe, where she leads work on climate

resilience and sustainable urban design. Hello.

“I guess I'll just start off with Rob, why is it so hot today?”

So I'm going to go from the purely meteorological perspective, we're under anti cyclonex so high pressure conditions, we've all used it really, and where they're talking about low and high pressure. And high pressure is largely, there's a lot of dominating descending air, and the so-called heat domes, problem is that it gets self-sustaining.

The heat dries the soil out, and then the heat gets worse because the soil is dry, so they can become somewhat self-sustaining and get hotter and hotter and hotter, and you don't have to go very far outside to find some soil that's bone dry. And Rob, I'm interested in the longer-term reasons, I guess, for the heat, most people would talk about global warming and climate change as one of the main reasons for this.

And I was wondering if you could like contextualize this year's heat wave in terms of longer-term trends. Wow.

We're probably looking at having either the first or second hotest period in the UK's basically

measurable history and the history we've measured. So, 2022, 19th of July, was the day we hit 40 degrees in parts of Britain.

“We may probably won't quite get that hot, but it is really important to point out that”

it's June. It's not July, and June is not normally as warm as July is, so that does matter. The fact that we're within a degree or two of the all-time maximum, not in the right month as it were, in itself, is worrying, shocking. Now, don't let people say this is all climate change, because we would have had hot spells.

We would have had really hot spells before humans came along and changed our climate. What we've done is make the hot spells we already were having hotter.

The 1976 heat wave comes up over and over again, whenever it's hot people say we're

hot in 1976.

“The difference to what we're seeing now, we saw in 1976, is about five degrees difference”

in the temperatures. It doesn't sound like very much, it's only five degrees. Five degrees is the difference between average June and average October. It's an enormous difference. We can all feel it.

We all know. This is unbearably hot, early in the morning, not just two in the afternoon, it's unbearably hot at seven in the morning. We're ready. I hear a lot about this idea of global warming to leading to a 1.5 degree increase or two

degree increase, and it doesn't sound that bad, but the reality feels very different. I guess that is a one and a half, two degrees on a absolutely global annual average. The patterns, the weather patterns, the hot and cold spelled everywhere, so to get the whole lot to go up by a degree in a half, you either have to put everything up by a degree in a half or you put the extremes up.

We're sort of seeing a bit of both, basically, is what's really happening.

Certainly in terms of UK climate, possibly the biggest effect isn't so much, it's just a little bit warmer all the time, it's that the extreme weather we're seeing, we see the way I've phrased it before, we see more extremes and the extremes we see are more extreme. Over night, minimum temperatures like tropical nights and so on, these are just things that have gone from either incredibly where to every few years or from basically not possible

to now happening occasionally. If you'd have asked me five years ago, when we'd hit 40 degrees Celsius in the UK, I would have probably said likely that around 2040, maybe a bit later. And then we did it in 2022.

“And does it keep going from here, like what are we looking at in 2040, 2050?”

If we keep treating the atmosphere or treating our climate as we are, then there is no, this isn't going to stop, we're not going to stop, the growing risks and the growing extremes and somewhere like the UK, it might not be the day to day, it becomes uninhabitable but the once or twice a year that's unbearably hot becoming even more unbearably hot. There's not joke about here, there's a red weather warning because these temperatures

are genuinely life threatening and I think one of the biggest things we as a country need to think about is how the whole country handles it. We have working conditions rules on how warm it has to be when it's really cold outside. There is no rule, it says it's 38 degrees in your office so you don't have to type in your date of but continue your day to entry.

You've done my job very nicely for me there, Rob, which is off the back of that if we are going to continue to see more extreme extremes, dimple, I'm interested in the two-part aspect of what that means for our identity, I guess, as a northern western European country where we think for ourselves it's a sort of very temperate climate and how much that maybe, as you said, Rob, is impacting our ability to adapt as much as limitations on technology or

financing. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, this week everyone's talking about a heat and it's kind of easy

to talk about heat during a heat wave but in the middle of winter we always forget and

I don't think we identify ourselves as a warming country, I don't think we recognise that there are dire consequences every year, even in the years where we don't get such big heat waves, we are still seeing like excess mortality morbidity in 2022, I mean, Rob, you mentioned

“about the red weather warning and the sort of kind of danger, like in 2022 we had, I think”

about 3,000 deaths that are related to heat across the UK, we have no idea what that's going to be this year but it could be somewhere near that and that's going to get worse and worse, so we do need to take that seriously and I think we've also noticed it's been absolutely chaos this week but yeah, you know, on the sort of severe end of the scale, it really is severe.

And I guess how in terms of the practical ways in which cities can adapt, I'm interested in, you know, why say southern Italy might have temperatures similar to what we had today in London and has had those temperatures maybe for the past decade, I certainly feel like if I go on holiday in southern Europe and it's 35 degrees, it doesn't feel as horribly stifling as trying to get onto the Victoria line in 35 degrees, I mean part of that is

about adaptation, I'm interested, I guess, dimple in how a city like London could adapt to heat and what it is about our infrastructure that makes that kind of heat so unbearable. Yeah, that kind of anecdote about other places feeling so different at 35 degrees, I've

are designed to keep the heat in, so you know, with winter and mind, so of course they're going to retain heat during temperatures like this and Rob you already mentioned, you know, the schools already hot, our homes are even hotter, our hospitals are hot, care homes

are the critical infrastructure, so we do need to think differently about how you retrofit

“our building stock across London, but across the UK as well, I think there's a number”

of different dimensions that we need to think about when addressing heat, I mean just thinking about cities, you know, we need to think about how we retrofit our building stock, but then also zooming out to our neighborhoods and cities, so what kind of urban infrastructure do we put in, so things like greening, some cities have put in reflective roofs across much of the building stock, even reflected roads, I think LA has tested that out, so there

are large measures that we could be looking at, there are some cities that are looking up things like wind corridors, so I think Stuttgart is a great example where it's about long-term planning, so really going from building scales to those interventions such

as blinds, insulation, ventilation, through to urban scale, and then also just thinking

about like timeframes, so Rob you mentioned, there are things that we could be doing in terms of providing provisions for workplaces, so I guess having threshold temperatures, that stuff that we could do immediately, so those operational measures, how do we mobilize the healthcare system, so we should be thinking about that now, but in the long-term, it's really about how do we change the way our city is built, and how do we retrofit

“that, so thinking medium, long-term as well, so I think there's a lot of different dimensions”

to think about, but I guess it just goes back to that mindset, we need to stop thinking about ourselves as being a temporary climate and an increasingly hotter climate, and so it's bad now, but in the future it could be much, much worse, so what do we put in place today?

I think to your point, dimple, there's something sort of material and policy-based that can

be done, but there's also an attitudes issue in terms of how we culturally think about warm weather, the image that pops to my mind is sort of bees in the sunshine in the park, compared to how maybe a southern European country they're very used to staying out of the sun in the hottest part of the day, and I guess the question then is how much of this is about an identity shift and a cultural shift and a behavioural shift rather than necessarily

or, I guess, as well as an infrastructure problem? Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I started my career working on master planning projects in much hotter places, so like the Middle East, being an example where it does get much, much warmer, and it's about how can we design for that and design better, and increasingly over the years that has shifted more towards Europe and the UK, so there's certainly been

a bit of a change there, and I've seen good and bad examples, and I guess we need to think about as a nation, what do we want to follow? So do we want to be the kind of nation where we are living in our condition boxes, getting into our condition cars, getting into our condition offices, or do we want to follow some of these, I guess more traditional approaches, so maybe like the Mediterranean, as you've

mentioned before, where actually we're doing things like putting shutters on the outside of our buildings, keeping the heat out, maybe actually not working in the hottest part of the day in the summer, but having a bit more of a sort of, I guess, evening economy, or people just working later hours, so there are choices out there, and I guess as in, yeah, we just need to think about which way do we want to go?

And I think one of the parts of your research and sort of research around urban planning and heat management that I do also find interesting is that unequal impacts that heat can have within cities, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about in a society where we see growing levels of inequality, what we can expect to see in terms of communities that are more and less impacted by rising temperatures.

That's a really important point, so there are certain socioeconomic groups that are going to be more vulnerable to heat impacts, so we already understand that people that are older are going to have more adverse impacts in terms of heat, health outcomes and also mortality. I think most of the deaths that we see are in the over 75s, of course, the UK when it comes to heat related deaths, but there's also other things to think about such as income deprivation,

“so of course, what resources do you have to actually adapt to heat, can you actually”

afford a fan or an AC, you know, or whatever it is, or to make the changes, the passive changes in your buildings? We did a bit of work a few years ago for the Greater London Authority where we mapped out urban heat island across London and then overlaid that with socioeconomic vulnerability, but

and you can then see that actually there are certain hotspots where you've got all three

things compounding and that really creates higher risks, so although it would be great to be able to do everything all at once, we do need to prioritise and we do need to think about the most vulnerable, and there is a lot more data and information out there to for us to do that, but the other thing is that we need to talk to communities as well and understand what this specific issues are, what the impacts are and then, you know,

“what solutions will work for them, I think is really important, so we do need to look”

at it across all those dimensions. I have a question written down here, which maybe is a little bit abstract, but it says "how hot is too hot?" So I'll try Rob first and see if you have an answer to that question. I guess to me, as a meteorologist, 40 did that, 40 was a big round number, isn't it?

And we went past it, it was shocking because you passed a round number and you didn't think you could get to it. 35 is still unbelievably hot. I was thinking, "God, 25 sounds a bit hot to me, I think 22 is probably my ideal temperature." But the other dimension, well, the other thing there is, is humidity as well, so I mean,

I spent a few a couple of months in Singapore and it is hot there, but it's that the humidity

is like sort of 80, 90 percent that just makes it unbearable and I think on the news, they've

“been talking about that, I think this particular spell has been quite humid, so I think”

that's probably one of the other reasons why it's feeling quite bad, but here on a personal level, I definitely think the 20s are fine for me. In terms of how hot is too hot, I guess, it's a difficult question and I guess what we need to think about is what's acceptable, is it acceptable to have any single, like even one death related to heat, one hospitalization, like what are we trying to sort of aim for?

So even if the temperature does get hotter, actually, should we be asking, how many deaths are too many deaths, how many hospitalizations, etc, how many school closures, and I think we should maybe think about it that way, like in terms of heat impacts, because, you know, to a certain extent, it will continue to get hotter, but that doesn't mean we can't do anything about it.

I'm Stephen Vasigar, climate editor at The Observer, and I want to tell you about my latest podcast, Counter-Crisis, from the Center for Disaster Protection.

“Some disasters come suddenly, others build over time, but the impact they have on people”

and countries can be devastating. The blast was really, really loud, and then it followed by the ash rain, the black rain. In this third season of Counter-Crisis, we'll be hearing from countries affected by disaster, and we'll understand how finance can make a difference to people's lives. We'll hear from those on the ground, working to help communities recover and prepare economies

to face up to new dangers, and here by the innovative role that financial protection can play. We have to learn from the experiences we have to build in such a way that we are more resilient.

Listen to Counter-Crisis, wherever you get your podcasts, follow now to ensure you never

miss an episode. To both of you, from your sort of different work backgrounds, what is the highest priority for how we can tackle the heat in terms of not sort of long-term reducing the impacts of climate change, but sort of in the next, let's say, year, if we were to come back to this summer next year, what could we have done in that time by next year to make sure

that this was more bearable for everyone? I'll go first, so the next year gives us really short timescale. So I would say, as a government, as a society, that's probably enough timescale to have been guidelines and regulations for things like working practices when it's hot, which is going to have to factor in the fact that things like schools aren't safe.

So that means parents can't have to look after their children and so on. We need to factor all of that in, and that sort of thing, surely can't take very long to bring in. It's really obvious now that it's urgently needed as well. Insightly longer-term, we probably think once things like building regulations to start

being allowing for better abilities for cooling of houses and thinking about simple things like when installing heat pumps, them also being able to go backwards so they can cool a bit in the summer as well. There's some fairly simple things that wouldn't be desperately difficult to implement. So they're not going to make huge differences, but they can at least be a help and we need

something to get started before. We are trying to prevent the worst dangers of climate change now. When with governments increasingly thinking around the world being less and less, pro climate change action, the actual consumer is still very much worried about the climate emergency

So there's still market pressure pushing towards a greener future to excellent, but it's

not just that.

“I think we need to be starting to think about adaption and practically how we're going”

to cope in a world that is now going to be warmer.

Certainly all of the above, but I guess one thing I'm just going to take something from

what I heard earlier today, so Emma Howard Boyd who heads up the National Heat Risk Commission, she was, I think on BBC News earlier, and she mentioned that we need to move from an emergency response when we have these heat wave vents towards a more systemic

“national resilience strategy, and I think that's, again, goes back to that mind frame”

change, really thinking about long-term planning, I already mentioned a few of the solutions,

Rob, you've mentioned a few solutions as well at different levels, so I think we know what we can do and what we need to do, but we need to plan it out better. We've got great examples from around the world, so all of the solutions that we just need to think about implementing those and they're thinking about those long-term.

“And I think it's important to say, it's not just the UK that have these problems, most”

of you up front, Germany, etc. They have exactly the same problems, they're climate has changed. We think our heat wave's bad, fronts is making ours look pathetic, and they're having exactly the same problems, they also don't have enough regulations on it, just handle because they've got a society that hasn't grown up with this happening. Thanks so much for speaking with me both you, and I hope that you can find somewhere cool

for the rest of the day. That's it for today, and thank you for listening. Next week we'll have a new story for you. It's about the trash kings of the UK and the organised crime that's creating rubbish mountains until then. The Observer