Matt McGrath
speaker
122 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Matt McGrath’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 — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Anybody who's been in the UK, Europe, parts of America, parts of Asia, parts of Africa through the last few months will have recognised the intense heat that many parts of the world have been suffering from and the related extreme events such as storms, droughts that have accompanied all those.
So it's no real surprise that the data for August shows that the global temperature for the whole of the world was the warmest on record.
I think what is surprising for scientists in some respects is the margin of the scale of the warming rate.
The Copernicus units are saying that basically it's 1.65 degrees higher than pre-industrial times.
And that number is really important because politicians in Paris in 2015 agreed that they would try and keep the global temperature under that 1.5 degree level.
And now we see in this particular month, it's gone past that.
Now, it's not a breach.
Usually that temperature is measured over 10 or maybe 20 years, but it's significant because of the direction of travel and the scale of it.
And I think that's what's worrying scientists.
I think there's a number of things that are different with this particular piece of data.
I think the scale of the intense events that we've seen, what used to be normal, I guess, back in 10, 15 years ago, you might have one heat wave in the summer or two.
Across Europe and the UK, we've had four, potentially five big heat waves.
And in other parts of the world as well, it's the intensity, the severity...
The fact that these are continuing to happen one after the other, the sequence of them.
And I guess behind all this is what the scientists say is the onward rise of carbon emissions that are doing the most damage here.
They are the key factor in driving up this heat and keeping that heat high.
And we're seeing this played out across the world in this summer, perhaps like we've never seen before.
I think it's interesting.
You see the responses from governments.
The governments everywhere are very concerned when they see the scale of the heat waves that overwhelmed parts of Europe in some respects.
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