Hello there and many thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast, with me Paul Connelly.

Like near empty ketchup bottles we tear numbers in the news and elsewhere in everyday life,

upside down then shake them eagerly until every last drop of fact and or fiction oozes out.

This time around, the digits in question relate to rising mercury and possibly a media

frenzy.

This wave is gripping parts of Europe with temperatures reaching more than full

of itself.

In recent weeks, the world's media, including the BBC, got boiling hot under the

colour, about heat waves and soaring temperatures.

In Sardinia, for example, a regional record-breaking temperature of 48.2 degrees Celsius was reported.

So first things first.

This from the steady creep of course of climate change and the current El Nino, what are

the other factors in the mix here?

So there was a number of heat waves going on around the world at the same time.

These high pressure systems also associated with reduced cloud cover, which enables more

solar radiation to reach the ground.

And this in turn means the sun's energy is heating up the Earth's surface.

That's Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

And then another important point is, in Europe, we had wind blowing hot air from Northern

Africa into Europe.

But across social media, not everyone was buying it.

A trickle of skepticism swelled to a tidal surge with people questioning whether temperatures

...