The Heat is On: The Rising Threat of Heatwaves in the UK

In this enlightening episode of our video podcast, we dive deep into the pressing issue of heat waves and their alarming impact on the United Kingdom. With an eye-opening discussion inspired by recent warnings from MPs and the Environmental Audit Committee, we explore the potentially dire consequences of inaction in the face of increasing extreme heat events. We dissect a report indicating that up to 10,000 people a year could face fatal outcomes due to heatwaves if comprehensive measures are not taken. The economic repercussions are also staggering, with a potential cost of £60bn a year to the economy.

Philip Dunne MP, the Conservative chair of the committee, delivers a compelling call to action, emphasizing the urgent need for government and societal response to mitigate these risks. We also delve into the historical context provided by the UK Health Security Agency's issuance of its first-ever 'level 4' heat alert in July 2022, a testament to the unprecedented temperatures the UK is experiencing.

Moreover, the episode discusses the global perspective, noting that 2023 was confirmed as the hottest year on record by a significant margin, underscoring the fact that this is not just a local, but a global crisis requiring immediate and decisive action.

Our expert guests provide insights into the challenges and potential strategies for addressing this "present danger," emphasizing the importance of developing a robust plan to combat the escalating threat of heat waves. Through engaging discussions, we aim to raise awareness and spur action among our viewers, highlighting the critical need for preparedness and adaptation in the face of climate change.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Going Green podcast and today we're gonna have a look at heat. Yeah, basically last year was a record-breaking year. Is this gonna be a record-breaking year? And what we want to concentrate is having a look at how does this affect the public health or more precisely the public death. So public health, something we all know about because we're the public and we have our health and we're looking at people dying from heat exhaustion. It's one of those odd things where to classify is they are looking at sort of heat-related causes of dust. So they're looking at things like heat stroke. I can't remember the other things. Quite a lot. Movie mic. Yeah. If you're gonna face me. So yeah, what is basically going on here is that it isn't just heat stroke. It's not just heat that's causing problems but as the climate changes perhaps as what's happening in South Europe basically mosquitoes are moving in. Now we've got dengue fever that we didn't have. Now we've got the Anopheles mosquito causing malaria and now we've got deaths from malaria that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the climate change. So these are now going to be classed as heat related deaths. Yeah and it's not say as in say like things of course like a warm climate or even a heat like heat wave causing things. But it is sort of say climate heat as in the increase in average temperature is leading to these related things. So they're actually classifying, way different classifying things and saying you know they're that's how they're modifying saying these are heat related deaths because of course if we weren't the climate wasn't hotter they wouldn't have arrived or come here. So therefore heat is the or temperature is more the factor that they're actually saying is related to the cause of death than anything else. And you know it's one of those things where they saying sort of you know 9.4 of extra deaths a year. Now you might think you know 9.4 that's nearly 10% you think extra so that's you take the death rate who knows you know thousand you add an extra 10% suddenly you know there's a hundred of 1,100 deaths and you know we're actually looking at a lot bigger number than exactly oh I'm just saying globally is the 10% but if you just look up say places like here they've said it's something daft like 54% more women are gonna have dying from heat related causes. Unfortunately by men men have got other different death causes to be worried about but just reporting that and it's one of those staggering things that are saying and is all these things from catching malaria is these other I say you know heat related cause or or cause or fire heat stuff. We've got some interesting ones that you see this country Britain where we live we're not designed for heat we have houses that are relatively well insulated that that is actually a discussion really but we basically got houses that are designed for a cooler climate and when we get something like a heat wave here well when I've been to Europe what you do is you open the windows and you close the shuttles here it's what yeah I was gonna say I don't remember having these shutters here in the UK because we don't have any. We can turn the aircon on oh sorry. We don't have any aircon in this country because it's one of the things where it's not worth it in the long term but perhaps maybe it could be. Our aircon is opening the windows isn't it yeah that's what I have in my car I have aircon and I asked the kids when we're out you know should I put the aircon on they go yes so I wind down the window. And then we cry because then we're being baffled by wind it works but there you know it is one of these things where you hear all about all these ways of sort of being causing death but all these rising temperatures and say let's turn the aircon on we haven't got the we are adapting to it. I'm not saying by the year 2050 an extra hundred thousand deaths could be happening per year and I'm not saying that's bad because it's sort of what is bad because we don't want people dying off. Unrelated reason you know I you know they're dying from old age that's good you see it's happy but then dying early because of course of climate change now that that's sad and disappointing and that's what the UK. Health agency health security agency I'm not quite sure. You know but anyway there's this health group you know they've been talking about British Medical General yeah yeah that's the same people you know they recently made a report saying about this 10,000 extra deaths if of course if the average temperature is increased by I think they were said. 1.5 1.5 they didn't do two two degrees scenario that only did 1.5 and as we've talked to you in other episodes 1.5 is due to arrive very probably this year. And it's not not a sad and sort of saying but these these deaths are avoidable we're looking at they could be avoidable if I say someone was to do something about it and the answer is this is where adapting to the climate and sort of trying to do things like sort of placing air con into say not elderly care in care homes those sort of places is good idea. Problem is to say who is it not was it worth it but who's gonna pay for it yeah and this is where they have the wanted some funds you know the whole cop thing was trying to generate some money to do this climate adaptation and unfortunately. We the UK are giving money away instead of spending on ourselves and which is not saying wrong or bad because of course you know money needs to be spent on other places. So, as in a global effort needs to be done, but we also need to sadly think of ourselves here in the UK, let alone elsewhere because we're all facing the risk yeah if. And you know, as I said, the simple answer which is to all of this, which is the worst part is if of course we reduce our mission or even halve them you know not saying, then we could avoid sort of or extend the time of which we need to put all these funds in and it's sort of one of those daft things where you know not much effort there. I actually solve off trying to put all this stuff in which is what they all these reports are trying to say that it's bad for our health do all this stuff government seem to accept that they're going to have to solve problems they're not prepared to put money in to prevent a problem, but they know then they have to spend money on sorting a problem out. Yeah, the UK health security agency gave us this country, its first ever level four heat warning in July 2022 and the likelihood that we're going to get another one this year. And the hottest year is the hottest year by quite a bit, which is what makes us think that we're actually going to sort of need to make plans, and we need to make plans now, rather than. It's coming. And one of the looking at the reports hilariously half of their plan or at least the solution to the temporary solution of this was let's build more parks, or more precisely let's build more shaded areas of parks, and you know which is what the government technically committed to anyway, and it was seen as doing if he did this, then of course that leads to basically more, not more shape, but sort of trees do wonders in trying to not reduce the temperature, that's the wrong way to put it. They do, they do. Yeah. And, and basically that's what the report was saying, you know, if you plant more green areas or more parks and things in more trees produce more shelter. They've got the added bonus of reducing emissions by course, you know, photosynthesis, but they've also got the, you know, this is moisture barrier that actually helped cool things people down and things. And there's all these lovely things we can tell a very anecdotal story of that one in that we went on holiday quite a few years ago, actually we're done in the south of France and down in the south of France, we're on a canal. Now the French canals are wonderful. What they have is they have plain trees every few meters on both sides and it's beautifully shaded and there's the water evaporates the trees there are putting water it's cooling effect and it was really pleasant. And then we got off the boat and we went perhaps into a little village to sort of get some bread or something. And suddenly it was a lot, lot hotter. It was a wave of heat. Essentially you just walked in because it's also, as I say, trees have an area of influence. So sort of as soon as you're outside. But whilst we're on holiday, of course, France at the time was recording record breaking heat wave and lots of heat stroke deaths and all sorts of things caught by heat. And yet the canal they were on, it was actually lovely and cool and not sorted that bad because of course, not that it was shaded. But because the extra bonus of having trees and the water, relatively large body of water had a lot of cooling effects that you were actually quite pleasant. And so you almost want to say, that's the template of where we need to be going. And unfortunately, you look at a city or even a town and then you go, but this is not how we build towns and cities and things. We're not like Venice. Yeah. When I moved to the town where I live in, which is Hamill Hampstead in England, we walked down the high street and it had at the top end loads of trees. We will admit then the great storm hit us and a lot of those trees came down. If you walk down the high street now, there's not a tree in sight. It's a concrete jungle. Not that we need to go there. There's not many shops or anything like that. But it's not a place that you want to go to. You've got large asphalt roads. You've got concrete buildings. They build up the heat. They radiate it out. Now, perhaps in sort of springtime, that actually makes it a little bit more pleasant. But in the summer, when it's hot, it makes it really unpleasant. Yeah. And the people move to the park. They do. They were, they were talking about inside, of course, this health report, which is where we're getting all the information from is that they were saying that urban areas. So much like our little concrete jungle are actually eight degrees warmer than the surrounding areas outside the concrete ground. And they said, if there was a park, then it was actually the, the, the, the, I said, that the park was actually significantly cooler than actually the concrete jungle. It was next to. So you had eight degrees and sort of maybe it was the part was saying cooler by four. So actually the difference between being in the concrete jungle to the park was actually 12 degrees in temperature and obviously downwards. And, you know, when you're at 40 suddenly, you know, even 40, 45, you know, that sort of trend of going is actually turns nice and decent temperature, but a livable temperature rather than built into all this. The crisis we come across is that we are building concrete jungles without thinking about green areas of nice green habitation. But of course you've got to understand there's a problem of wanting to go. Where you're going to put people where you're going to put the buildings and sort of darkly, where do you want to put the roads? Because that's the problem. It is all the roads, you know, and I'm not saying make places more walkable, livable and get rid of roads and put payments down because of course payments are still concrete asphalt on you, that sort of material. So you're not helping that in regards. You basically need not wide boulevards, but you actually need to move the buildings away from each other so you can not necessarily put a line of trees down the middle of the street. That's not a bad idea. But that will actually lead to more space in the less build up of heat because it basically bounces away rather than actually concentrate. It's just one of those things where they said there was lots of the angles of trapping heat. If something forms and basically bounces back in across it, it traps it. Whereas if you add the space and this is the important thing, they're not necessarily talking about you don't actually need to plant the heat. You don't actually need to plant trees or anything at the moment, but just space between buildings, you know, having that not but putting trees in will also give us a large carbon sink. It will get rid of a lot more carbon dioxide, which is part of the thing that's causing the problem at the moment. So we can. The UK, where we live, it's not designed for heat. We didn't design our towns, our villages for heat. You go to Europe. The houses are designed differently. They have sort of the typical terracotta roofs, don't they? Rather than the sort of gray ones that we have here, although my gray roof is largely hidden by solar panels. But most of the roofs are gray. They absorb the heat and they make places sort of gradually worse. We're needing to change things. Either we need to retrofit a lot of the houses in this country or we need to basically design new and better towns, cities, thinking more green rather than anything else. I came from a town, Southampton, and that had a very green park policy. And wherever I lived in Southampton, I lived in a few parts. It wasn't too far to go to the nearest park. I now live in lovely Hamill, Hempstead. I use lovely in probably inverted commas here. I do live next to a park. It's only a few hundred yards away that I can walk to two parks. But the same cannot be said for most places in Hamill, Hempstead. No, unfortunately not. And this is where we need to think about what we're doing. Not measuring more thought, but actually look at where we're going and actually plan for, unfortunately, the future heat as an increase in heat and potentially come up with ways to mitigate that. Yeah, because since we're going from a very hot to a very cold climate, basically the winters are getting warmer, but they also can be quite cold still, right up to quite balmy heat wave. Like we're having now. Like we're going through, not the three. And we're looking at sort of where the places that go through not this rapid change in heat, but the sort of cold winters followed by really hot summers. And the answer is we actually need to look to more to places like Africa, because they do not not saying on the equator because it's not I'm talking Northern Africa where basically they live in deserts. Now, this is a really hot during the day, of course. But then during the night, they're really cold. They're really cold. And so you got to look how how they've adapted to doing this. And it's one of the things where, of course, they use lovely things like paint and it's boring things like white paint. Obviously that reflects a lot of things away instead of building of dark materials to actually lock in and absorb that heat. Using clever things like that. And it's they talk very much about ventilation in regards to actually not helping the passage of air move. But if you can sort of find a way to get air to move around places, that's then actually makes the heat more variable because it's you're able to actually, I say sweat and perspirate, but you're actually able to your body able to get heat away and so getting that way. So it is this future heat that we need to look at to determine where is and how best to actually transform our lives necessarily, but sort of the global community in regards to knowing we've got this increase. Well, we're sitting here in midwinter in the sort of northern hemisphere and it's not really as cold. I've seen other years looking back over photographs of snow on the sort of roads and there were double digits here at the moment, you know, much more mild. But if we go down to the southern continent and have a look around there, the southern part of the hemisphere, we're looking at places like Buenos Aires. They're sort of rapidly approaching 40 and they're complaining that from Reuters that everything is melting and they just can't escape. They've got what, 45 million people in some like Brazil and they're all suffering here from very hot temperatures. And what can they do about it? Well, it's not such a developed country, not so much resources. There's this country and they've also got rid of a lot of the rainforests as well. That's not helping either. It's getting worse. Yeah. But one of the major things, of course, is they're not doing the thing of which is what we, unfortunately, what we've done, they're making the same mistake is that I say they're urbanizing, but they're actually not taking into account green space because unfortunately, what they're saying is, but having a green space, that's not useful land and therefore not making money. What's the point of it there for? Yeah. If I build a house that generates me income, you know, so sort of, you know, that's why they're developing building more houses and more and more houses and creating more and more urban jungle and actually creating sort of spacious, not outside parks, but sort of understanding better land use to actually mitigate things. It's not just land, of course, it's the sea. The sea last year was 1.4 degrees warmer in the North Atlantic than the sort of 1982 to 2011 average. That's quite frightening. They're worrying about at the moment, looking at all the figures that three degrees is sort of, well, going to be just around the corner. And that's really frightening to think that the sea temperature is going up. We were talking about 1.2. Suddenly we're on 1.4. We're thinking about 1.5 and this is making life difficult. The sea is a huge heat sink and although it can absorb an awful lot of heat, it does have this nasty habit of moving around and making places like perhaps the UK having warmer seawater than we've been used to. And it happened last year and there's no evidence to show that it's not going to happen again this year and the next year. And so we've got to get prepared for this and try to sort of adapt. Unfortunately, one of those many things is in all sorts of this research, you've got problems of what's the effect of say El Nino on this or there's all these ideas that not they come up with, but the sort of you got to look at sort of the research and say, right, this is directly heat affecting us as opposed to say the oceans temperature. That's actually not directly affecting us, but that is causing stronger storms and sort of more, well, honestly, more storms, but at least stronger storms. And so that's affecting us in a different way or because. Yeah, so other people that get killed by a storm coming through and uprooting trees and killing them are they results of heat sounds daft to think that we actually quite cold, but it's the change in temperature, the change of having hot and cold meeting that tends to generate these terrific storms. Paul and I have been watching these storms move in and we're moving quite rapidly through the alphabet at the moment. Yeah. And they're all very low storms out there all very deep storms strong winds. Yeah. Unfortunately, just how the, I'd say the, the currently how the jet stream is built, but is that mixture between the cold and the warm that's affecting it. And that causes strong, basically storm, storm so fair and it's the right conditions and effectively we just have the right condition to cause storm upon storm upon storm upon storm across the Atlantic like a conveyor belt. And that brings more rain and floods as well as generally warmer temperatures, although if a really cold bit. It's a really warm bit. So you've got a warm bit with typically lots of rain in it and it meets a very cold bit and somewhere like Norway's had very cold. The men they meet there you get snow, but I was reading another simple report which said about global warming and it said Norway had got really cold. But if it hadn't been for global warming, it would have been perhaps four degrees warmer. So it didn't break the records. It was pretty damn cold, but it would have been even colder without global warming. Yeah, I was reading that in regards to they said everything getting warmer, but actually Norway is one of the places that is set to actually get colder because of all the increased warmth, which is one of these. It's like the UK or everywhere is set to get warmer and hotter and drier, except where where they are not quite the opposite. We're expected just to get wetter and warmer. Yeah, we just expected just to get wetter and warmer as opposed to. Yeah, that's all this ice melting in the Arctic and Antarctic. It's getting smaller and it's moving down and it's got to go somewhere in the UK right in the firing line. Yeah, so and this is the crux of the whole thing. And of course, the major part is of course climate is not constantly evolving. That's the wrong way to put it, but it's continuous. You can't say. Right. You know, you could always look at sort of what previously happened to them for work out why things are happening now. And then you can trace back things. You can trace back all sorts of say the storms to the conditions across America and the jet stream where there was a cold plume that met the tropics. And of course, that's where the jet stream was sort of intensifying and that's where the basically created this almost not shotgun blast, but sort of, you know, and that just propelled and created the right conditions for the conveyor about to build all these storms up and through. And see, that's where, yeah, as I said, all the reason we got lots of storms wasn't because of where we are in the world. It was because of course over the other side of the world. So there was a cyclone and we heard that story of cyclone heating. And we heard that it's a Japan. It's a knock on effect. It's about three to four weeks. We then get the effects. And of course, you know, that's a whole month. We have to work out what's happening elsewhere a month ago to determine what's going to happen now. So we look at elsewhere now, we can actually predict what's happening now. Yeah, we can't. So it's a whole world effect. It's not Britain suffering. It's not Argentina suffering. It's not about wildfires here floods there. It's everywhere. Everywhere is suffering from global climate change. We're seeing the heat build up. We're seeing how it affects people. We're seeing that more people are dying as basically the climate changes and effects, not just one place, but the whole world. It's quite worrying really. And if you're worried, well, you can join us because we're worried about it. And what we need to do is we need to try and impress upon all our politicians throughout the world that this is of global importance. But it's also of local importance and it's about people dying. You've been listening to the Going Green podcast, looking at heat and the problems that it's posing to public health. We'll be back next time with another item about Going Green and climate change. Until then, it's goodbye from me. And a goodbye from me.