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Global News Podcast
Extreme weather special
00:42:34
We ask why extreme weather events are on the rise and how we can better predict them
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Transcript126 lines
- [00:00]
Alex Ritson
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Josh Hartnett
What does it take to go racing in the fastest cars in the world? Oscar Piastri.
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Chris Fawkes
Your head's trying to get roofed one.
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Josh Hartnett
Way, your body's trying to go another. Let's roll.
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Chris Fawkes
It's very extreme in the sense of how close you're racing. Wheel to wheel.
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Josh Hartnett
We've been given unprecedented access to two of the most famous names in Formula One, McLaren and Aston Martin.
- [00:23]
Chris Fawkes
I'm Landon Arts. They build a beautiful bit of machinery that I get to then go and have fun in.
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Josh Hartnett
They open the doors for their factories as the 2024 season reached its peak. I'm Josh Hartnett, this is F1 back at base.
- [00:34]
Graer Jackson
Listen.
- [00:35]
Josh Hartnett
Wherever you get your podcasts, your time.
- [00:37]
Zoe Kleinman
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- [01:41]
Alex Ritson
This is a special collaboration between the Global News Podcast and the BBC Weather Team. I'm Alex Ritson and two weeks on from the start of the LA wildfires, we're looking at the increasing and terrifying number of news stories around the world involving extreme weather. I'm here at the BBC Weather Studio in London with weather reporter and meteorologist Chris Forks. Chris, hello.
- [02:06]
Chris Fawkes
Hello.
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Alex Ritson
Tell me about what you do.
- [02:08]
Chris Fawkes
So here at the BBC Weather Centre we produce well over 100 forecasts each day. We broadcast to a couple of hundred million people on TV and radio at the BBC. We're quite a small team actually. We've got 12 presenters that work here around the clock here at the Weather.
- [02:24]
Alex Ritson
Centre and you've got some incredible equipment which we'll tour a little bit later on. We'll come back to you later in this podcast. We're also going to be joined by our tech editor, Zoe Kleinman. Graea Jackson from The climate question. Marco Silva from BBC Verify and Myra Anubi from People Fixing the World. We'll be finding out why extreme weather events are on the increase, what role climate change plays, and how we can better predict, contain and even prevent some of the most devastating results. But first, let's start with a reminder of why all this matters.
- [03:02]
Myra Anubi
The National Weather Service is predicting close.
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Alex Ritson
To hurricane force level winds.
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Chris Fawkes
The anticipated winds combined with low humidities and low fuel moistures will keep the fire threat in all of Los Angeles county critical.
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Alex Ritson
Please be patient with us. People are saying, I just want to go look at my house and I.
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Chris Fawkes
Want to see what's left.
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Josh Hartnett
We know that, but we have people.
- [03:26]
Chris Fawkes
Literally looking for the remains of your neighbors.
- [03:29]
Graer Jackson
In some areas, more than a year's.
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Marco Silva
Worth of rain fell in just a few hours.
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Chris Fawkes
It is a catastrophe. The floods we had in 1982 when I was 10 years old, were a joke compared to what happened here yesterday.
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Alex Ritson
Thousands of hectares of farmland have been.
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Chris Fawkes
Destroyed and the UN is warning more than half a million people are in.
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Alex Ritson
Urgent need of food and drinking water.
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Chris Fawkes
We are already displaced people from war zones and after the floods, we don't have anything left.
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Graer Jackson
It's the worst drought I've ever seen.
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Chris Fawkes
In my entire life.
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Joao
Joao and others are carrying huge, heavy bottles of water on their backs. The ground is very, very dry, covered in huge cracks. There's absolutely no water to be seen here.
- [04:17]
Sachin Anna
This is the third storm in a year.
- [04:20]
Chris Fawkes
Even before the officer got to me, the water was all the way up to my chest.
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Alex Ritson
This tilde's devastated and we need help. Chris and I have decamped from the BBC Weather Centre and come up to the Global News podcast studio. Chris, we heard there from the US in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, from the drought in the Amazon in Brazil, from the wildfires in Los Angeles and Portugal, and then the devastating flooding in Valencia in Spain. Where do you want to start?
- [04:57]
Chris Fawkes
Well, we should start, I suppose, in la. That's the most recent of our stories. And you know, here we do get a lot of variability in our weather from one year to the next. And actually the last couple of years, 2022 and 2023, were wet years in Calif. What this did is actually created pretty good conditions for vegetation to grow. Now, normally in Los Angeles county, we get most of the rain falling between October and April in a typical year. This year in Los angeles, well, between May 2024 and now, they've had just four millimetres of rain. So they've had barely anything. And that's led to severe drought conditions that's dried out all of the vegetation that's grown rapidly over the last couple of years from those good growing years, if you like. And it's resulted in tinderbox dry conditions. Added to that, we've had something called a Santorana wind. This is where we get air descending down through the atmosphere. It becomes very dry and warm as it descends. We get high pressure to the east of the mountains, low pressure in the Pacific that causes the winds to blow. And over the tops of the mountains, we're seeing gusts up to about 99 miles an hour. And so once these fires started, they spread very, very quickly, not just across the vegetated areas, but throughout whole communities, as we've seen. Yeah.
- [06:12]
Alex Ritson
And we've had a question from a listener on this. Just take a listen. I am Sachin Anna from India. How did the fire pick up its intensity and how did it spread over a wide area, destroying everything in its path and reducing everything to ashes? Yeah, how did it happen so quickly?
- [06:31]
Chris Fawkes
I mean, there's still question marks about what instigated the fire. You know, was it natural, was it arson, was it power lines clicking together in those strong winds? I think there are questions still to be asked about that. But once you start these fires, because those winds are so strong, so dry, so warm, and we've got all of that vegetation that's just there available to burn. Well, adding in that persistent wind for day upon day upon day, it makes battling these wildfires extremely difficult and dangerous because you've got embers just flying up into the air. They can leap over firefighters, setting off new blazes, and you can get all kinds of severe phenomena, even fire tornadoes we've seen mixed in with these, which create some particular hazards. Now, according to the California Department of Forest in fire protection, 19 out of 20 of the largest wildfires in California have occurred since 2003. And seven of the 10 biggest fires in California have occurred since 2020. Now, one of the central predictions about climate change is that we expect droughts to become more frequent. And so the conditions for these wildfires become more frequent in a warming world.
- [07:44]
Alex Ritson
So more of them to come. And of course, it's not just fires, is it? We heard about another extreme weather event that hit the US last year, and of course that was Helene.
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Chris Fawkes
Yeah, Hurricane Helene was a really interesting storm. It underwent rapid intensification. That's where the winds pick up by 35 miles an hour in 24 hours. Now, this one was even stronger than that. It hit the Big Bend region of Florida as a powerful Category 4 hurricane. 140 mile an hour winds, the strongest ever to hit this part of the United States. Now, that caused problems, but I think the biggest problems from Hurricane Helene actually came as it moved inland land. It weakened significantly into a normal area of low pressure. And you might think, well, that's it, that's the problem's gone away. But it wasn't. If you consider that water hazards are responsible for 86% of fatalities in such tropical systems, well, it's the water that's the far bigger hazard. And this area of low pressure became slow moving in Tennessee and it brought enormous falls of rain. In the mountains of North Carolina, we recorded 30.78 inches of rain, 780 millimeters of rain. And that led to catastrophic flooding. And Hurricane Helene became the deadliest hurricane to reach the mainland United States since Hurricane Katrina way back in 2005.
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Alex Ritson
And then there was that terrible drought in the Amazon. What was going on there?
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Chris Fawkes
Yeah, well, this one's interesting because it's partly driven by climate change, partly driven by natural events. So as we heard a moment ago, droughts become more frequent in a warming world, and that's the background that we're in in our current climate. Temperatures globally are about 1.3 degrees Celsius, higher than they were during the pre industrial period. So that makes droughts more likely. Coupled with that, we've got a natural phenomenon going on. El Nino. Now, in 2003, 2004, we had an El Nino pattern that also reduces rainfall. So it was the combined effect here that caused the severe drought. With quite a few rivers in the Amazon basin actually reaching their lowest level on last year. I have to say things are slowly improving now because we are going into the rainy season and we're starting to see the drought ease in parts of Brazil, which I suppose is good news. But yeah, climate change does increase the risk of such droughts.
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Alex Ritson
Yeah. Talking of rainy seasons, everyone will remember the images of the flooding in Spain. Cars literally being tossed around like toys. More than 220 people dead. And there were complaints about the way officials handled it, weren't there?
- [10:22]
Chris Fawkes
Yeah, there are questions, I suppose, that still remain about the floods that hit Valencia. I mean, there was a huge amount of rainfall in just eight hours, about a year's worth of rain fell, 491 millimeters of rain. And that led to some catastrophic flooding. I've been looking back, though, at the performance of the local weather authorities. Aemet, they're the Spanish forecasting authorities. And in the days ahead, they actually predicted this area of low pressure. They called it Adana weather event. And they do get these several times during a year. But they highlighted this one was going to be, particularly in the morning of the floods, they had a top level red weather warning that was in force. So they were expecting some severe flooding. But what came was enormous amounts of rain. And I think if we look at this area of Spain, we've had deadly floods that happened back in 1957 and 1982, so they don't come along too often, but when they do, they can be absolutely devastating. And I think what we see with this weather event is an enormous amount of rain coming in a short space of time. The rivers in this part of Spain run off the land very, very quickly. So you don't necessarily get a lot of warning before a wave of water hits your properties and your communities. So I think the main questions that still are to be asked really about this are about when the public received warnings from the government, both the national governments and the regional governments, the way that the water levels were monitored in these river catchments, given that the history of flooding and how quickly the flooding comes on in this part of the world. And of course, like a lot of places around the world, we've seen quite a bit of construction in what are known to be flood prone areas. So there are questions that remain about this flooding. I can look back here in the UK, back in 2007, following the catastrophic floods we had here in the UK, there was a Pitt review that was done by Lord Pitt and he recommended a much closer collaboration between the Met Office, which is the UK Forecasting Authority, and the Environment Agency, which is responsible for issuing flood warnings. And that resulted in the setting up of the Flood Forecast center, which is manned by Hydro meteorologists. What they do is they can take weather data, forecast data, and model what the response of the rainfall is likely to be on individual river catchments. And so that's led to a much more joined up approach and we're much better at forecasting floods these days. So there could well be questions about how we go about forecasting floods in other parts of the world in the future.
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Alex Ritson
Yeah, that's fascinating because definitely the complaint at the time, I just remember the stories that we were running, was that people, even if the information had been there, they didn't feel they'd been warned.
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Chris Fawkes
Yeah, that's right. I read reports of people actually getting notified on their mobile phones about the flooding when it was happening, when the rain was already coming down, but from a meteorological point of view, at least there were red level weather warnings, top level weather warnings that were issued the morning that day, so actually hours before the flooding event hit.
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Alex Ritson
So being able to provide people with enough warning that an extreme weather event is coming is a key part of limiting their impact. But how does weather prediction actually work? So I'm back in the BBC Weather Centre with Chris Fawkes. And Chris, how does this work? How does weather prediction work? Show me your machines.
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Chris Fawkes
A lot of the stuff that we do starts off with the computer models that model the atmosphere. And the numbers involved in these computers are truly staggering. The UK Met Office supercomputer that crunches all the numbers can do 14,000 trillion sums a second, taking in 215 billion weather observations every day. That's enough for 2 million sums for every man, woman and child observation the planet. So the numbers are immense. There are a million lines of code that go into these computer programs and what comes out is a simulation of what we think the weather is going to look like. But even after all of those calculations, we all know that sometimes the weather doesn't quite go to plan. And so one of my jobs as a forecaster is to look at the computer model outputs, take a look at things like satellites or weather observations. And I have these available to be right the way around the world and actually go and have a look.
- [14:41]
Alex Ritson
So, Chris, obviously I am not an expert in this like you. What I see on the screen is what it's a huge map of Europe. I can, I can see, I imagine those are the clouds just off the, off the coast of Spain. But what I can't really tell as someone who isn't an expert is, is what all this means. Show me what I should be looking at.
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Chris Fawkes
Okay, so what we're looking at here is the Mediterranean Basin. So we can see the satellite picture. The white is the cloud here. And this particular area of cloud is actually a named storm. It's been named by the Italian meteorological authorities. And if I zoom in, I can see the structure of cloud. Not just that, but I can actually see these weather observations. Now these come to us from right the way around the world. The ones we're looking at here are actually on the north coast of Algeria. And the numbers here tell me that we've got some very, very heavy rain at the moment across northern Algeria. And this is one area we're watching to see if there might be some flooding over the next few days.
- [15:41]
Alex Ritson
It just looks like a fluffy cloud on the screen, but it's when you click on there and then I guess you're right clicking, aren't you? And then the numbers come up which give you that backstory.
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Chris Fawkes
Yes. So I'm zooming in and all of the circles you can see around the world, actually, I can zoom right out and show you right the way around the planet. Go to Singapore. They've got some thunderstorms there at the moment. So these are the actual observations that people are recording.
- [16:08]
Alex Ritson
So, Chris, that's what we have currently. I'm going to go and see Zoe Kleiman. Can you come with me, our technology editor. Let's see where she thinks the technology might be evolving. So, Zoe, you're on the line. How are you doing?
- [16:24]
Marco Silva
I'm good, thank you. This is such a good topic, I think, because as someone who lives in a particularly cold and wet part of the world, weather prediction is very important to me in terms of where I go, what I wear and what I take with me when I go out.
- [16:38]
Alex Ritson
Well, Chris and I have just been looking at the finest state of the art current weather prediction technology. But you're the expert on what's going to come, aren't you? How is it going to change?
- [16:48]
Marco Silva
I think weather prediction is getting more accurate and it's going to increasingly get easier. And the reason for that, it might not surprise you to hear, is artificial intelligence. I want to tell you about a really interesting tool that we've just had some new research on, published last month. It's called Gencast and it was made by Google DeepMind in the UK. And it's basically an AI AI program that does weather predictions. And it performed 20% better in tests than the current world leader. And what's really interesting about it, not only was it better and more accurate on day to day forecasts, it was also more accurate on extreme event prediction up to 15 days in advance. And it was better at predicting the paths of hurricanes, which, as we know, can change quite dramatically at very short notice. It was trained on 40 years of weather data, which is an awful lot of data and also contained an awful lot of variables, and it used that data to make its own predictions. It does the same as traditional predictions, by the way, which is called ensemble forecasting, where you get a range of them, but it was calculating which one was the most probable. And it was very good at it. Traditionally, forecast tools involve basically solving enormous amounts of equations, and they use supercomputers to do it because they have to, but it still takes a long time. And gencast managed to process its forecast in eight minutes, which is considerably Faster, isn't it? But of course, the data it was using had been gathered and processed in all of our old school ways that we've been doing for the last 40 plus years. And so what we don't know is whether going forward, if we were to just rely on AI generated data, because that would become, wouldn't it, our data set, whether it would be as reliable, we don't know.
- [18:43]
Alex Ritson
So we talk a lot about the impact of, of artificial intelligence on everything from medical diagnoses to even lyric writing. Is AI making a difference in predicting the weather too?
- [18:55]
Marco Silva
I think it's certainly got the potential to do that and, and we're going to see more and more companies focusing on that. I guess one of the ironies is that it might end up being matters related to climate change that could hold it back because we know that AI is a very power hungry tech. It's very energy hungry. It needs banks of computers in massive data centers to run it, and a lot of those at the moment require large quantities of water to keep them cool. And so although there is hope that perhaps it will come up with solutions to the climate change problem that we haven't yet thought of, there is an environmental price tag attached that is currently quite high. And some experts question whether we can actually afford it in terms of the Earth's resources.
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Alex Ritson
Chris, do you find this exciting? Do you see your job changing?
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Chris Fawkes
Oh, I'm sure it will change in the future. You know, every time there's been available extra computing power, we've seen a step change in the forecasting capabilities and I don't suppose AI is going to be any different from that. However, I have looked at some AI models from time to time when the forecasts have been difficult. And I've gone back and looked what had been predicted by these AI models on previous days. And, and you know, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good. I don't see anything groundbreaking at the moment in terms of difference in the day to day forecasting whenever I've looked at these models, but I'm sure it will come. It is early days, as they say.
- [20:24]
Alex Ritson
Chris and Zoe, thank you. We'll be back shortly. Still to come in this podcast, these.
- [20:33]
Graer Jackson
Large, heavy cows are like habitat engineers. So their role here is to eat and move in a way that help us to prevent another wildfire.
- [20:42]
Alex Ritson
We find out about some of the possible solutions to these extreme weather events.
- [20:54]
Josh Hartnett
What does it take to go racing in the fastest cars in the world? Oscar Piastri, your head's trying to get ripped one way, your body's trying to go another let's throw.
- [21:02]
Chris Fawkes
It's very extreme in the sense of how close you're racing. Wheel to wheel.
- [21:06]
Josh Hartnett
We've been given unprecedented access to two of the most famous names in Formula One, McLaren and Aston Martin.
- [21:12]
Chris Fawkes
I'm London Arts. They build a beautiful bit of machinery that I get to then go and have fun in.
- [21:16]
Josh Hartnett
They open the doors to their factories as the 2024 season reached its peak. I'm Josh Hartnett, this is F1 back at base. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:28]
Alex Ritson
Okay, so we've been talking about extreme weather events and forecasting the weather and hovering over it, climate change. So to explain the links and differences, Graer Jackson of the climate question is here. Hello Graer, what's the difference between weather and climate?
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Joao
Yeah, it's a great question. So the main difference is we're looking at timescale. So when we're talking about the weather, we're talking about short term events, maybe days, maybe weeks at most. When we're talking about climate change, we're talking about really long term studies. We're looking at averages over a year, maybe even a decade. And the other key difference is that climate change is solely driven by humans behavior. When we drive around our petrol cars or burn our coal fires or cook on gas, these are all emitting planet warming gases which are causing our planet to warm 1.6 degrees warmer in fact than pre industrial times. That's new data from Copernicus EU's Climate Service just recently. So two real differences, sort of the length of time we're looking at. But also climate change is solely driven by our actions.
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Alex Ritson
If it's not a stupid question, why does climate change cause extreme weather?
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Joao
It's not a stupid question at all, Alex. It's a great question I think. And you know, we can look at it in lots of different ways depending on what extreme weather we're talking about. But if you take heat as an example, as the daily temperature shifts to warmer levels, hotter days become more likely and more intense. What does that mean for things like fires? Well, longer lasting heat waves draw more moisture out of the soils and vegetation. That creates very dry conditions, you know, perfect fuel and tinder for fire that can spread at incredible speed. I mean, particularly if the winds are really strong, just like we've been seeing in la. But with all that moisture being drawn out of the ground, out of lakes, rivers, the vegetation, we get more moisture in the atmosphere. For every 1 degree of rise in average temperature, we see about 7% more moisture in the atmosphere. And with more vapor in the air, that means rainfall can become even heavier. So there's lots of different ways in which climate change is making weather more extreme.
- [23:48]
Alex Ritson
So how much extreme weather is caused by climate change?
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Joao
So we can say broadly that extreme weather is becoming more likely and more extreme in a warmer world. That's according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Change is where the world's scientists get together and produce gold standard research and publication. But we did have this major scientific breakthrough two decades ago where scientists began to attribute climate change to a specific weather event. And when you look at it today, they roll out these studies within a few days of a hurricane. I remember Hurricane Beryl, you know, results came out, I think it was just five days after it made landfall, about how much rainfall was made worse by climate change. And it' really interesting how scientists do this work. There's one particularly prominent group called the World Weather Attribution. They're based at Imperial College London. And I caught up with their lead scientist. She's one of the pioneers of this kind of work, Dr. Freddie Otto on exactly how they do this, and that was recently on the Climate Question podcast.
- [24:57]
Sachin Anna
We have very good observations and very good records of how many greenhouse gases have been put into the atmosphere in addition to to the natural ones since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And then we can take these out of the atmosphere of climate models and find out what's possible weather in the world that might have been without climate change. And if we for example, find that a heat wave in today's climate is about a 1 in 10 year event, but find that without human induced climate change it would only be a one in a thousand year event, then we can attribute the difference. So this change in likelihood that this event has been made 100 times more likely to climate change, because that's the only difference between these two climates that we've looked at.
- [25:48]
Alex Ritson
So grea what is the impact of extreme weather?
- [25:52]
Joao
I mean, it's huge and typically it's felt by the poorest among us. And that's because often poorer people don't have the means to evacuate or rebuild after a disaster. Perhaps they don't have insurance on their home or life savings and they can be left destitute afterwards, especially in places like Bangladesh where perhaps you can't take your cows or your chickens, your way of life and the way you earn money into a cyclone shelter. But if you want to put a number on it, the International Chamber of Commerce commissioned a report on the cost of weather. Do you want to have a guess, Alex, at what that figure might be for the last decade?
- [26:32]
Alex Ritson
It's going to be in the trillions, isn't it?
- [26:33]
Joao
Yeah, it's US$2 trillion. In the decade leading up to 2024. I mean, the US saw the greatest losses, followed by China and India, But I mean, $2 trillion, yes, it sounds like a lot, but actually there are so many things that we cannot quantify, like the loss of entire ecosystems or even loss of life. And that loss of life is going to be. I mean, the World Health Organization says that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause a quarter of a million more deaths per year. And that's purely from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress. That's not including people who are dying in floods or fires like we've been seeing in la.
- [27:18]
Alex Ritson
Grant, take a listen to this. We've got a question from Avner in Israel that we'd like to put to you.
- [27:25]
Graer Jackson
In summits dealing with climate change, leaders from around the globe may commit to ideas their successors would not always like, such as in the case of Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden. How can that be resolved, assuming the world needs to progress continuously?
- [27:41]
Alex Ritson
That's an interesting question, isn't it? Because politicians, many politicians, don't like spending money if the fruits of that money, if the results aren't seen while they're still in office.
- [27:52]
Joao
Yeah, I mean really what your listener is asking is, is democracy up to the task? Especially if we see governments flip flopping about when some are seen as very climate progressive and others are seen as less climate progressive. And actually the best answer I've heard to this question comes from an expert I spoke to a few years ago and he said it has to be democracy has to be up to the task because people want to have a say in how their country is governed. There really isn't a good alternative. But the interesting thing about Bide and Trump is that there was still a lot of progress made under Trump's first term, despite the fact that he's said things like drill, baby, drill and call climate change a hoax. Back in that first term, solar power more than doubled and wind increased by 50%. And the reason that is is renewables are far cheaper than oil, coal and gas. You know, this is what a lot of economists are talking about now, this great green march. The economics of renewables make so much sense to the market in that maybe they don' need as much investment as much subsidizing. As they previously did. So what I'm saying is, yes, Trump may in the short term cause more greenhouse gases to go up into the sky, more climate change, but the trajectory in the US and for many other countries in the world is down.
- [29:14]
Alex Ritson
Graer thank you, Greer Jackson of the Climate Question. So we know what the scientists say, but there are still people out there who believe man made climate change and the resulting extreme weather events which we report on are a hoax or conspiracy. Joining me now is Marco Silva from BBC Verify. Marco, how does that work?
- [29:38]
Graer Jackson
It's a very good question and certainly one that shows how those beliefs can defy logic. So one thing that I've noticed as part of my job covering climate change myths and disinformation is that every time these extreme weather events happen, be it heat waves, floods, hurricanes, you name it, there will always be an explosion of misinformation online. Of course, by misinformation I mean false and misleading claims being made about these events. And that misinformation can be focused not only on the political response, for example, the aid relief, but also, perhaps more importantly to me, the causes of those events. Now, as we heard Greer say there attribution linking specific extreme weather events to climate change requires quite a lot of scientific work, is difficult, but we can say for sure that many extreme weather events are indeed being made more likely more intense by climate change. What some people say online is that they look at these facts and they dismiss them outright. They look at these extreme weather events and say this has nothing to do with climate change, climate change is a scam, climate change is a hoax. And instead I've seen increasing numbers of people turning to often conspiracy theories to try and make sense of these rather other dramatic scenes.
- [31:03]
Alex Ritson
And there are some egregious examples of that, aren't there?
- [31:06]
Graer Jackson
Absolutely. Absolutely. I've been telling my colleagues that for the last year, most of my time has been spent covering extreme weather events, where indeed people turn to conspiracy theorists to make sense of what happened. The hurricanes Helene and Milton in US were one good example, with people suggesting online, wrongly, without any shred of evidence, that these hurricanes, these storms, had been engineered into existence. Now there's no technology available to humankind that allows us to create or control hurricanes. But still those beliefs were there. More recently in Spain when flash floods hit the region of Valencia. There too, there were allegations that weather weapons had supposedly been used to create this storm. Again, there is no evidence to suggest that is the case. And even among the numbers of people who are making these claims, there isn't always consistency about who exactly is deploying these weapons for what purpose they are being deployed. But what we do know is that very rarely there is any credible evidence to back such theories.
- [32:19]
Alex Ritson
Just how widespread are these views?
- [32:22]
Graer Jackson
You know what, it's rather difficult to quantify just how many people share these views. What we do know is that whenever these extreme weather events happen and these claims go viral, online posts and videos making these claims are getting millions of views, right? You have millions of people literally engaging with this type of content. Now, some people might say, well, this is just social, this is just social media being social media. It doesn't actually transpire to the offline world, as it were, but we can see in a number of different countries that, that there are politicians, especially politicians, who describe themselves as anti establishment politicians, who will embrace these narratives, who will themselves platform some of these ideas.
- [33:15]
Alex Ritson
Chris, you're the BBC's weatherman. Does this affect your work?
- [33:19]
Chris Fawkes
Well, the one thing I see quite often on social media, you know, questions directed at us are around chemtrails is the idea that some people have that the government's somehow spraying us from the skies is contrails, aeroplane contrails. These are ice crystals that follow airplane engines. And of course there's a little bit moisture that comes out from burning fuels at that's altitude in the atmosphere. Here's the thing, these things are predictable. If the atmosphere has got quite a bit of moisture in it and you put extra in from airplane engines, you get these persistent airplane contrails that can last for most part of a day. There are other times when the atmosphere is very dry at the kind of height that planes fly at. And you'll see very quickly those contrails just evaporating. So nothing to do with getting sprayed about. That's a complete fallacy, a complete hoax. It is just atmospheric physics. It's just about how much water there is up there in the atmosphere.
- [34:17]
Alex Ritson
So just to be completely clear for the record, you are not part of some global cover up.
- [34:21]
Chris Fawkes
I'm not spraying anyone.
- [34:22]
Alex Ritson
Okay, Mark, Some people might think that these conspiracy theories are just so spurious, they're hardly worth our time and attention. Do they have a point? Why do these things matter?
- [34:35]
Graer Jackson
Well, before I answer that, it's still worth pointing to Chris and say that colleagues like him, where the presenters have been at the front line of experiencing the results of this misinformation, as a result of the misinformation that I'm describing here. Here, colleagues like Chris are being harassed on social media. And this is not A preserve of the BBC. Weather presenters all around the world have been reporting harassment and attacks by people on social media who say, you are lying to us about the real causes of the weather. The floods that we're seeing, the heat waves that we're seeing, they're not actually natural phenomena, they have been engineered. So there is already that consequence of, you know, real world harassment from people who share these beliefs. But also there is a wider point here to be made, one that certainly many experts that I've spoken to make that because these narratives spread so widely, what could happen as a result is that action, urgent action that is required to deal with climate change is hindered, that he's delayed because let's face it, if you look at flash floods, if you look at the many of the extreme events which scientists have conclusively linked to climate change and say that's not to do with climate change, this is day, some amorphous entity that is controlling the weather, then quite likely, you're perhaps less likely to put pressure on your politicians, on your own government to, to take the action that is required to deal with climate change. So experts say that misinformation could effectively delay very, very important, very important, very urgent action that is needed to tackle this problem.
- [36:24]
Alex Ritson
Yeah, and possibly even worth nodding to the fact that it's awful to have to say it, but people who believe these theories do have the right to vote and politicians know that.
- [36:35]
Graer Jackson
Absolutely, absolutely. As I said, we've seen in a number of countries politicians embracing these narratives and sometimes also weaponizing these narratives. Again, just to go back briefly to the example of Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the U.S. one of the claims, as I said, that the hurricanes had been engineered was that the hurricanes were being engineered to target specifically Republican dominated states. Of course, the context of this claim was it was a very energetic campaign in the run up to the US Presidential election. And so, so people who believe that these storms were engineered was saying the system is trying to target us. Those who don't necessarily vote for the Democrats.
- [37:20]
Alex Ritson
Marco, always fascinating. Thank you so much. Marco Silva from BBC Verify. With extreme weather events on the rise and most nations a long way off from meeting their targets for tackling climate change, it can all feel quite disheartening, but there are are many people who are pushing ahead with their own solutions and projects to combat extreme weather events. Myra anubi from the BBC's People Fixing the World podcast joins us now. Hello, Myra.
- [37:49]
Myra Anubi
Hi. Hi Alex, how are you?
- [37:50]
Alex Ritson
Very well, thank you. Happy New Year to you, Myra, with what's happening in la. There's a lot of talk, of course, of wildfires at the moment and how another disaster like that could be prevented in the future.
- [38:05]
Myra Anubi
Well, it's true and it's sad to see what's happening, but, you know, from People Fit in the world, we are seeing some promising ideas. Just to give you an example, there are two companies that are currently collaborating to use smart technology to be able to find wildfires as soon as they start and then deploy drones, for example, to be able to contain the fire and help before more people can get to the scene. But the thing that makes this really interesting is that they're also using. Using sound. And yes, I do mean sound, but kind of high powerful acoustic wave technology to quickly and safely suppress the fires without causing any damage. So this could help when people don't have direct access to water, but also help to avoid the need for the use of harmful chemicals to put them out. But really, like you said, Alex, it's about not just finding and, you know, putting out these fires, it's also about preventing them from happening in the first place. Now, in places like North America, there's something called the wild horse fire brigade that uses native wild horses to reduce and maintain grass and bushes, which are fuel for these wildfires in forests. So it's kind of like starving a wildfire before it even begins. And something similar is happening in Spain, but not just with horses, also with cows. Our reporter Craig Langren went to Madrid to find out more about these four legged firefighting friends. And while he was there, he met someone who works with the animals, Rafa, who told him that he had seen the impact of a wildfire when he was just a kid. Kid.
- [39:37]
Graer Jackson
What I remember about these wildfires is looking at what was happening in the forest from my bedroom window. It's something that I will always remember.
- [39:46]
Chris Fawkes
Aided by high winds and 40 degree heat, that fire back in 2005 swept through this part of Spain, destroying 5,000 hectares of woodland and killing at least 14 people.
- [39:59]
Graer Jackson
These large heavy cows are like habitat engineers. So their role here is to eat and move in a way that help us to prevent another wildfire.
- [40:08]
Chris Fawkes
Unlike the horses, which mainly eat grass, cows eat pretty much anything.
- [40:13]
Graer Jackson
They not only eat grass, but also.
- [40:16]
Alex Ritson
They eat shrubs, they eat leaves, they eat branches.
- [40:19]
Chris Fawkes
Along with the cows voracious appetite, they trample in the vegetation and it's that trampling that helps to open up the forest so it's not so densely packed full of flammable vegetables, vegetation.
- [40:29]
Alex Ritson
And Myra, you've also been Finding possible solutions to the problem of flooding.
- [40:35]
Myra Anubi
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're seeing and hearing about different things. So for example, sponge cities in places like Singapore and Mexico, which is basically working with nature to help absorb, store and purify excess rainwater. But here in the north of England, there's also a project run by the conservation organization RSPB or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds that's working to prevent flooding in a very unusual way by re wiggling a river. So just to explain here, over a hundred years ago, farmers in the area Swindle Valley, where this is happening, they wanted to stop their fields from being flooded, so they carried out this back breaking work of straightening a river. But this made the issue even worse, as Annabel Rashton from the organization explained.
- [41:20]
J
Means when you straighten the river and that water can rush through really, really rapidly. So the natural bends and wiggles in a river is part of what slows that water right down. Also you create a problem where because that water is moving really rapidly, although they were trying to get their flood waters off their fields, they're just pushing the problem downstream. So you're increasing the flood risk further downstream.
- [41:43]
Myra Anubi
Now there's still a very small section of the straight river that shows you what it looked like before. But the rest of the river, well, it took a turn for the better. The river now meanders like a snake with lovely clear water flowing freely. How do they transform it?
- [41:59]
J
So back in 2016, we set about putting the natural wiggles back. So what you can usually do is when you start to look is see the ghost channel of where the old Wiggly river used to be. But you can also find evidence as well. Underneath you can find the old river bedrocks and the old river gravels usually in the land surrounding the river. So it was a question of a digger coming in and digging those lovely nice meandering channels back into the ground and putting the river back.
- [42:29]
Myra Anubi
So they dug up the old path, the river flowed through and then nature pretty much did the rest. Think of it like restoring something to its original setting. And so I think it's really Alex, about people working within their environments with what they have, but also working with nature to try and stop these disasters, wildfires, floods from happening.
- [42:49]
Alex Ritson
Oh, that took me back to my school geography lessons.
- [42:51]
Chris Fawkes
Myra.
- [42:52]
Josh Hartnett
Thank you.
- [42:53]
Alex Ritson
Myra newby from the BBC's People Fixing the World podcast. Chris Fawkes from BBC Weather still with me. Chris, we heard there about some great, really societal projects that people are taking on around the world. But what can people do in their own homes to protect themselves from the kind of extreme weather events we've been talking about.
- [43:16]
Chris Fawkes
Well, I suppose if you live in a flood prone area, there are steps you can take. For example, don't use soft furnishings on floors, use tiles. Because that way if you do get a flood, it's much quicker to clean up and get back to normal after the flood waters have receded. And the same for electricity sockets. If they're low down in your house, if you put them higher up, they're going to give you a bit more protection as well. So there are simple measures that people can take like that, I suppose, to limit the impacts that flooding might have in their individual houses.
- [43:47]
Alex Ritson
Chris, thank you so much. And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later with a special thanks to Chris Fawkes from BBC Weather and our other guests, Zoe Klein, Feynman, Grah Jackson, Marco Silva and Myra Anubi. If you want to comment on this podcast, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcastbc.co.uk. you can also find us on X globalnewspod. This is an important subject and we're thinking maybe we should be doing more regular global news podcast weather specials. Do let us know your your thoughts. This edition was mixed by Jack Gr and the producer was Anna Murphy. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson. Until next time. Goodbye.
- [44:50]
Josh Hartnett
What does it take to go racing in the fastest cars in the world? Oscar Piastri. Your head's trying to get ripped one way, your body's trying to get rid go another. Let's stroll.
- [44:57]
Chris Fawkes
It's very extreme in the sense of how close you're racing, wheel to wheel.
- [45:01]
Josh Hartnett
We've been given unprecedented access to two of the most famous names in Formula One, McLaren and Aston Martin.
- [45:07]
Chris Fawkes
I'm London Arts. They build a beautiful bit of machinery that I get to then go and have fun in.
- [45:12]
Josh Hartnett
They open the doors to their factories as the 2024 season reached its peak. I'm Josh Hartnett, this is F1 back at base. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.