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Chapter 1: What extreme weather events are currently affecting Ireland?
First, though, it's all anyone can talk about at the moment, so let's start with the weather. MetErin has issued thunderstorm warnings for 16 counties as temperatures remain very high. It came into effect a few minutes ago at 9am and will remain in place until 6 o'clock this evening.
There are warnings that storms could cause localised flooding, hail damage, difficult travelling conditions and even damage to utilities, including power and water. For more on this, I'm joined by Gerry Murphy, meteorologist with MetErin. Gerry, good morning to you. Good morning, David. Thunderstorm warning for 16 counties. Where is it going to be affected?
It's actually quite tricky to say where it's going to be affected. That's why there's quite a number of counties in it. The thunderstorms are expected to be quite hit and miss, but they will predominantly be likely to be more towards the west and north of the country, but also because of the high temperatures in parts of the Midlands, some of those counties are included.
So that thunderstorm warning will be valid until 6pm and it's for Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan and Ulster, all of Connacht. In Munster, Clare and Tipperary, mainly to the west.
Chapter 2: What impacts can thunderstorms have on local areas?
And in Leinster, Kildare, Leash, Longford, Meath, Offaly and West Meath, that's Midlands and to the north. So as you tend more towards the, from the Midlands to the north and the west, then the heavier showers and thunderstorms are most likely.
And as you say, it's impossible to predict exactly where they're going to hit. But if they do hit, there could be some quite serious impacts of that weather. Could you tell me about that?
Yes, well, there were actually... It depends on the nature of the lightning strikes. Last night, there were a large number of lightning strikes off the northwest coast, but they didn't give substantial amounts of rain except for a few of them. The threat with thunderstorms is that they could potentially... drop an awful lot of rain in a very short space of time.
And when that happens, then it means that the rain is torrential and that there is potential for flash flooding, difficult visibility and very difficult driving in those circumstances, which means in a heavy thunderstorm or very heavy shower, people would just need to stay down, stay very, very slow, possibly stop if they need to. But the shower will pass eventually.
But it can drop a lot of rain in a very short space of time.
Absolutely. And if you can't see where you're going, you should definitely not be driving your car in that. And I'm sure we've all experienced that sort of a deluge in recent years.
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Chapter 3: How are high temperatures influencing weather patterns?
Now, if you're looking at getting your weather information online, Gerry, you might see a number of outlets who are making pretty serious warnings, talking about things like golf ball-sized hailstones that could cause damage. Do we need to be worried about that sort of thing?
Well, in very heavy thundery showers, hailstones can occur. Now, we don't tend to get the hailstones of that size in Ireland because for hailstones of that magnitude, you need very, very significant updrafts and the temperature contrast between the surface and the upper air needs to be very great indeed. And that usually occurs in continental areas, both in America and in Europe.
While we may get hailstones and they may be a reasonable size, it's unlikely that we would get hailstones of that magnitude because the updrafts in the air over Ireland in the current scenario are not of that magnitude.
OK. And of course, we still have the high temperature warning nationwide in place until tomorrow, I think, is it?
Yes indeed the high temperature warning stays out today and indeed today it will be a contrast to yesterday. Yesterday the highest temperatures were in the west of the country with 32.2 degrees recorded in our station in Athenrae and indeed six stations broke their all-time record and they were all in the west. and northwest. Today it's different.
Today parts of the west will see a 10 degree drop so parts of Galway and Mayo that had over 30 degrees yesterday will be down at 20 or 21 degrees today whereas today it will be the Midlands and east of the country that will get the highest temperatures and they will still be in the high 20s and probably touch 30 or 31 degrees in the Dublin region.
Okay, things are forecast to change over the weekend though.
Yes, absolutely. It'll still be very mild tonight. So that's why the high temperature warning goes out to tomorrow morning. So still quite a mild clammy night tonight with temperatures between about 16 and 18 or 19 degrees. But then tomorrow, the cooler air will come in. We will see some showers again tomorrow.
Again, the possibility of some thunderstorms in those showers during the day tomorrow and then cooler still on Sunday. So if we look at the highest temperatures for tomorrow, we can expect them to be between about 17 degrees in the west, 22 degrees in the east.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the heatwave in Paris?
I'm joined by Ben McPartland of the local France, journalist Ben McPartland. Good morning to you. I think you decided to get out of Paris last night. It was too hot.
Yeah, good morning. Yeah, it's been extreme. It's been really hard to handle, you know, we're honest. And the night times have been particularly difficult with temperatures over 30. And the teachers have told the kids not to come into school. We've got kids.
So I looked at the map and I saw the temperature was about five degrees cooler at night time, only 27, about an hour from Paris where my in-laws live. So we got in the car at 10 o'clock last night and just kind of fled. In a way, to escape the worst of it, we couldn't bear the thought of another night at 33 degrees Celsius, you know, in Paris.
Yeah, and Paris just isn't equipped to cope with those sort of temperatures, is it?
It's not, no. You know, the old apartments with zinc roofs, you know, they just transmit the heat. It's been hotter inside than outside. You know, even the high-rise buildings, you know, the sun is blazing. You know, I'm one of many, I see, who've put foil on the outside of their windows just to try and keep the sun out.
You know, a lot of the buildings, they've got no shutters and you walk around the street and you'll see people with fans and, you know... People are desperately trying to buy those mobile air conditioning units. They've all sold out.
People have put foil against the windows, you know, emergency blankets, emergency foil blankets, anything to try and keep the sun out during the day to stop those apartments heating up.
OK, and this temporary ban on drinking alcohol in public places, what's that all about?
Yeah, this took us by surprise yesterday evening when it was announced by the Prefecture of Police. They've announced... alcohol bans before. You know, Paris is one of those cities where a lot of people drink out, you know, by the riverbanks, by the canal in parks. And I think they just want to send the message that alcohol does not go well with heatwaves.
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Chapter 5: How are cities like Paris coping with extreme heat?
And then from 6 p.m., They said, you know, supermarkets and kind of off licenses are banned from selling alcohol. You know, I think they want to target those people who, you know, will buy alcohol and go and sit outside and drink, you know, with their mates, you know, throughout the night, throughout the evening. It's still allowed to drink in bars and restaurants.
You know, that's not a total ban. You know, that's what we try to check out. But it's mainly to send a message to people to say, look, don't drink while there's a heat wave on. You know, it's very hard to enforce alcohol bans in Paris.
Yeah.
Is there any sign of relief, Ben?
You know, I was just looking at the weather map before I came on. You know, most of the country is still on red alert for tomorrow. The heat wave is moving west. There's still, you know, a huge swathe of the country on red alert. So temperatures are going down. We're desperately hanging on, you know, day by day for the temperatures to go down.
But this is not going to end kind of overnight with a quick storm. It's going to, you know, next week should be cooler, but it's still going to stay hot. And the big fear... People are talking about whether there's more to come in early July, another one of these heatwaves that could be even worse.
We've got to remember, only in June, these heatwaves don't normally hit Paris until July and August, when schools are normally closed and a lot of people will be outside, away from the capital on holiday. That's why this one has been particularly bad. So, yes, things will get cooler, but only slowly. There's no immediate respite.
And just very briefly, Ben, how much pressure are hospitals and the emergency services under?
Yeah, they're trying to get the message out, you know, that hosticles are saturated. They say they're not overrun, but they are saturated. You know, there's been a double the number of emergency call-outs. You know, the number of heart attacks has gone up. You know, the health chiefs are really getting the message out that, you know, people really need to take care, not just elderly people.
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Chapter 6: What scientific findings explain the recent heatwave in Europe?
You know, I kind of passed a young lady who'd kind of fainted in the street yesterday who was getting help. You walk around Paris and you do notice there's just a lot of ambulances going around, you know, call-outs. You know, to people who are obviously, you know, the heat wave has impacted them.
They say, you know, the really the health chiefs, the government is trying to get, you know, mobilize the health sector to really cope with what's coming, coming in. I think we'll find out in the days to come exactly the kind of death toll that this heat wave has had on on the people in Paris.
OK, Ben McPartland of The Local France. Mind yourself and thanks for joining us. So all sorts of heat and humidity records have been broken across Europe in the last few days. But to what extent were they caused and magnified by climate change? Or is this just an outlier event?
According to scientists studying this heatwave, it would have been statistically impossible for Europe to experience three days as hot as the hottest in the last week before humans started warming up the planet. RT's Philip Boucher-Hayes has been speaking to the scientists who conducted this study. Philip, who are they and what are they doing?
Scientists are very loathe to use words like never or never ever or impossible. But the scientists at the World Weather Attribution Centre in Imperial College London found themselves presenting a set of statistics yesterday that basically amounted to saying nothing like this has ever happened before. This kind of an event would be impossible without...
man-made climate change influencing or exaggerating its effects. What they did was to take weather information from 850 cities in a big grid across Europe, from Belmolus to Bulgaria, and they saw how many records had been broken. Not just June records, because June is, as Ben McQuarton was just saying, not the hottest month in Europe. It's usually July or August.
But at 45% of those 850 weather stations, all time records were broken for both heat and humidity. This is the wet bulb temperature now, the temperature that matters to human beings. Physiologically, it's not just heat, it's the combination of the heat and the humidity that places additional stress on the human body.
And when they took all of that data and they put it into their computers and they start doing modelling, it shows them that if you were to have had such a widespread heatwave, in 1976, which of course we did, as you'll remember, it would have been three and a half degrees cooler.
If you were to have such a widespread heat wave at any point in 2003, not just the month of June, it would have been two degrees cooler. So this event would basically not ever have happened at any point during the years, the decades that we have been gathering reliable weather statistics.
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Chapter 7: How does climate change contribute to extreme weather events?
And why is it happening?
There's two reasons. One, it's really, really hot. The entire planet is really, really hot. We are absorbing more and more and more of the sun's energy. Scientists calculate that we are absorbing the equivalent of 11 Hiroshima bombs per second, per minute of every single day of every year.
And if you were to go back to 2024, the equivalent figure would be four Hiroshima bombs per second per day of every minute of every day of the year. So that's almost threefold increase within very recent living memory. And how hot is a Hiroshima bomb, you ask me? 2,000 degrees Celsius within a two kilometre radius of where the bomb was dropped.
So the sun is sending a huge amount of heat that we are not reflecting back out into space because there's less sea ice to do that, there's less clouds to do that. So it's being absorbed by the planet. The second thing then is the jet stream, the thing that governs nearly all of our weather here in Ireland, is slowing down and is wobbling and meandering and the weather in it is getting stuck.
And that's exactly what has happened at the moment. Because it's cold at the Arctic and warmer at the equator, the winds of the jet stream keep on moving in nice, fast-flowing concentric circles around the top of the globe, several hundred miles an hour up there at 30,000 feet. And they push the weather on through really quickly.
But because the differential between Arctic and equator is decreasing, because the Arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else on the planet, Those winds, those jet streams that keep those weather systems separated are slowing down and it's wobbling and it's weaving.
And there is a big wobble in the jet stream at the moment that has allowed all of this hot, wet air from North Africa to push right up into Europe.
OK, and we heard from Ben there hoping that the weather is going to break soon. Can we take confidence that things will get back to normal, that the weather will break, it'll get cooler and everything will be all right?
No, we can't take that confidence because this heat right now is just one expression of a wobble in the jet stream. It's going to be replaced by something else. You just heard Gerry Murphy talking about the amount of rainfall that we're about to experience now. Our weather is increasingly going to whiplash from one thing to another. That Ireland of four seasons in one day that we all grew up with
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Chapter 8: What future weather patterns can we expect due to climate change?
And when storms arrive, they will be wetter and they will be more violent and the winds will be stronger. And then there will be longer periods without any rainfall. The drought is going to dry things out. It's going to cause more wildfire. Basically, what we have to learn to think of climate change as is emphasise the second word, change.
It's unpredictable, unreliable, chaotic weather from now on.
OK, Philip Boucher-Hayes, thank you indeed for that. We'd all better brace ourselves.