This is the short edition of more or less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Thank you for downloading from the BBC.

The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use go to BBCworldservice.com slash

podcasts.

Hi I'm Ruth Alexander and I'm Wesley Stevenson and this week or, or more or less, on the BBC World Service,

we're going to look at two environmental numbers

that have been in the news.

And tell the story of two cities.

Later, we'll look at Beijing.

But first, Paris. And Beijing, but first Paris.

And this isn't the Paris of the Climate Conference in 2015.

We're going back to 1910.

This was the Paris of the Béle Park, the beautiful era between the Franco-Prussian War of the

1870s and the First World War. Paris was in its glamorous pomp of high art, high culture, and occasionally low morals.

But in 1910, that Paris almost sank without a trace.

The rain started in the summer of 1999, drenching the soil and the groundwater rose.

Warm weather melted the snow and across France the rivers rose.

Many of these swollen rivers flowed into the river Sen, the river that run through Paris, and the

sun began to rise. But this was the beginning of the modern age, and the French had

a system to collect data about the rise and then pass it on to one of the most brilliant engineers of the day,

Edmund Maier.

He was one of the world's leading experts in hydrology, the study of the movement of

...