El Niño, paired with climate change, 'just makes everything so much more dangerous'

Joining me from London is Gareth Redmond-King, Head of the International Programme at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. Thank you, Gareth, for joining us. Are we entering a period in which extreme weather events such as this tornado become not only more common but also more unpredictable? I think we are, yes. It's probably too early to say with any confidence the role that climate change played in what looks like a terrifying experience for that town. But we do know that as we heat up our climate, as we put more heat into the climate system, we are putting more energy into things like hurricanes and cyclones and storms. And so it would not be massively surprising to discover that climate change has its fingerprints over this tornado when scientists come to look at it in detail. Certainly the summer that we, the terrifying summer that we have seen across large parts of Europe already over the last few months is very much due to climate change. This very much represents the sort of future that we can expect to continue to see and indeed will only get worse and worse until we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and stop adding heat into our climate system. UK meteorologists have predicted a very wet and stormy autumn, which also doesn't bode well for us here in France because what happens in the UK normally very quickly spreads across to France as well. I mean, again, is this part of what we are going to have to deal with given the fact we're also confronting a super El Niño weather pattern? Well, yes, the Met Office in the UK has suggested that this is what the signals that are coming from El Niño look like, that it looks as though we're going to be experiencing a particularly wet and stormy November. This is, El Niño is in effect fanning the flames of climate change. We've, you know, humans have experienced, the planet has experienced El Niño since before humans were around. The problem, particularly with such a strong El Niño coming along, is that it is coming on top of 1.4 degrees of temperature rise that we have driven through human-caused climate change. So, El Niño, because it also adds heat into the climate system, it adds a greater degree of chaos to our weather, it drives extreme weather. Putting that on top of the extreme weather that we're already seeing from climate change just makes everything so much more dangerous. So, all the indications are that it is one of the strongest, perhaps the strongest in living memory, so that on top of these climate change temperature rises suggests that we're probably looking at the hottest year on record next year, with all the threat that that poses to our food system, to people's health and well-being. I mean, the extreme heat across Europe this summer is already reckoned to have cost over 30,000 lives, which is just horrifying, and we continue to add to that, and El Niño comes along to throw fuel on that fire. So, are European countries adequately prepared for an increase in severe weather events, which were previously considered relatively rare? I mean, I think our experience this summer everywhere is very much no. We're not used to thinking, certainly in the UK, we're not used to thinking of heat as being extreme weather and something that we need to adapt our homes and our workplaces and our public services for. The Climate Change Committee in the UK has a long list of unfulfilled recommendations for the UK government to make our public services and our infrastructure safer for these hotter temperatures. Even if we do the only thing we know that can tackle climate change, cutting our emissions to net zero, we're still facing these temperature rises already at 1.4 degrees, so we're still facing this being something like our new normal for summers to come. So yes, there is a significant job ahead for governments in European countries to get used to the idea that we don't only need to build our society for cold winters, but now for very extreme hot summers as well. So what should governments and local authorities be doing differently to protect communities from events such as the one that we've just seen, when they can develop so incredibly quickly? Well, I mean, the surest way of ensuring that we are protecting ourselves in the long run is to halt climate change, is to cut our emissions to net zero. But I mean, there are lots of ways in which we need to adapt. As we look at climate change impacts around the world, if you look at somewhere like Bangladesh, which has worked incredibly hard to adapt to incredibly dangerous cyclones, for example, it's had a lot of, quite rightly, had a lot of help from wealthy economies providing overseas development assistance and climate finance. It has built early warning systems, means of communicating very rapidly between communities when something is happening, places where people can shelter, means of protecting crops, all things that mean that whilst actually some of these impacts are getting worse and worse, actually they claim fewer and fewer lives. So in European countries, we need to be able to get ourselves into a position where knowing that there are going to be more people going into hospitals, for example, when there's extreme heat, that those hospitals are kept cool by passive cooling measures, by active cooling like air conditioning when needed, to make sure that they're safe for the doctors and nurses providing the healthcare, but also for the people coming in with the needs deriving from this extreme heat. So there are lots of ways that governments need to adjust the way that we build homes, the way that we provide public services to make them safe for these extreme conditions. Finally, looking ahead in the next 10 to 20 years, I mean, given we've just experienced a incredibly frightening summer here in Europe, what types of extreme weather events should France and the rest of Europe be most concerned about? More of the same. We're going to see more extreme, it's only going to get hotter, the more greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, the hotter it is going to get. So we're going to experience these, the Japanese Meteorological Agency has a great term for it, cruelly hot days. That's what we're going to experience more of, these cruelly, dangerously hot days. What becomes more dangerous in the longer run, however, is that the climate system becomes more chaotic. As we put more of this heat into the system, as these extremes get more intense, they actually start to disrupt much bigger systems. So for example, we see the jet stream being disrupted, that's part of what locks in these heat waves over Europe at the moment, but if parts of that jet stream, parts of what's called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Currents, which is currents in the North Atlantic, if parts of those currents were to get disrupted or even cut off, we could actually see a catastrophic change in our climate. We could actually see large parts of Northern Europe plunged into long-term, very extreme cold, for example, to the extent where we struggle to grow food, where people would need to probably migrate further south from parts of Europe. So there are unpredictabilities in terms of future tipping points as well, if we continue to let this get worse and worse. But in the short term, in the next few years, in the next decade or so, we can expect to see more of the same, more of this dangerous extreme heat, drought, water shortages, and then when the storms come, very, very heavy rain, which falling on parched ground can very quickly turn to very dangerous flash flooding. Gareth Redman King, thank you.