Ajit Niranjan
speaker
154 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Ajit Niranjan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And when it comes to these kind of mega blazers that are happening,
then it reaches levels that are just very, very, very difficult to put out, particularly when the weather is so bad.
There's been some critique internally in France about particularly one aspect of the lack of budget for fighting fires.
And so one of these particular issues is that only seven of these 12 Canadair firefighting planes were actually available to tackle the blaze on Saturday because the others were being repaired.
The fleet itself is fairly old.
It leads to things like France and Spain having to call on the EU and request extra firefighting support.
And so in France, I think the EU's deployed seven planes and four helicopters.
And these are coming from countries as far away as Sweden, which is obviously used to very, very different conditions in terms of firefighting than a country like France is.
And as far away as Turkey, in Spain, the EU has mobilized six planes.
And
One small saving grace one scientist told me is that although the fire season in Spain and France is particularly bad, Portugal has escaped some of the kind of horrific stuff it's seen in previous years.
And so I think the EU says it's deployed 134 firefighters and 41 vehicles from Portugal.
One thing that people often do not realise about climate change is that although these numbers sound really small, when we talk about global heating has hit on average across the globe 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and people, scientists are warning about, okay, we've got to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees C by the end of the century.
These numbers sound very small, right?
What they enable, though, when it comes to heat waves in particular, is this vast increase in the kind of most extreme heat that previously used to be very, very unlikely.
What's specific about the wildfires, though, is that we also, in much of Western Europe, including the UK and Spain, had a really, really wet winter.
And a wet winter – and in Spain, in many places, that was followed by a wet spring –
means that you've got a lot of water that helps plants grow.
And on the surface, that sounds great.
You want plants to be growing.
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