Adapting to a hotter Britain
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last week, temperatures in the UK reached a record-breaking 40.3 degrees centigrade. As Britons sweltered in their homes and offices, railway lines buckled, fires broke out in Greater London and the tarmac on Luton Airport runway began to lift. Climate Change scientists now describe this kind of heat as 'the new normal'.
How well is Britain set up to cope with extreme weather events? Do we need to start heat-proofing our houses and infrastructure? And does government need to focus more on adapting to climate change?
Joining David Aaronovitch are:
Mark Maslin, professor of Climatology at University College London
Glenn McGregor, professor of Climatology at Durham University
Richard Dawson, professor of Engineering at Newcastle University and member of the UK's Climate Change Committee
Kathryn Brown, former head of the Adaption at the UK's Climate Change Committee
Producers: Tim Mansel, Kirsteen Knight and Simon Watts. Editor: Penny Murphy. Studio manager: Graham Puddifoot. Production co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.7 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David O'Ronovich. |
| 0:08.5 | The briefing room is the metaversal thought capsule |
| 0:10.9 | in which inside 28 minutes you and I get to understand a big issue |
| 0:15.4 | with the help of the top experts on the subject. |
| 0:18.4 | This week, heat waves and other extreme weather. Can Britain cope? |
| 0:25.5 | As you know, if you were in the UK last week, you got hot. Today we saw airport runways melt, |
| 0:31.9 | train tracks buckle. Tomorrow could be even hotter. By mid-afternoon, we got a new provisional |
| 0:36.9 | heat record for the UK when |
| 0:39.0 | Conigsby in Lincolnshire reached 40.3 degrees Celsius. And there was a new provisional record for |
| 0:45.9 | Scotland too. London was burning. This was Wenington in the far east of the capital. A fire in a |
| 0:51.5 | parched area of grass was fanned by a stiff southerly breeze and engulfed |
| 0:56.0 | houses on the edge of the village. I could see a small bit of smoke coming out the back of their |
| 1:00.2 | garden. 30 seconds later we ran up to the house. The garage had already gone up. Their car was on fire |
| 1:05.5 | and the fire was spreading down the fence. Infrastructure, much of which was built from the Victorian |
| 1:09.9 | times, just wasn't built to |
| 1:11.9 | withstand this type of temperature, and it will be many years before we can replace infrastructure. |
| 1:18.3 | Parts of England may face a drought in August, with crisis talks due to be held today about |
| 1:24.5 | conserving our water supplies. Another heat wave is forecast for the weekend |
| 1:28.8 | and beyond. 40 plus degrees in a spot between the fens and the wolds is what climate change |
| 1:34.7 | that is already happening feels like. But this isn't a program about net zero, avoiding |
| 1:40.6 | catastrophic future levels of warming. This program is about how we're going to live on an already heating planet. |
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