- If you've been reading the news this week or perhaps walking outside, you would know
- that Europe is absolutely boiling.
- And the people living under this heat dome, which is hovering over much of Western Europe,
- are struggling to cope.
- In London, teachers spray children with a hose to help cool down in the blistering heat.
- And Prague beleaguered horses cool off in a river. In Paris, overheated shoppers line
- up to buy fans.
- Tereen Lebousit says the 100-degree heat wave has been "hell on earth."
- These are the scenes this week across Europe, from Bordeaux to Barcelona.
- The continent has endured a brutal, record-smashing heat wave that has turned deadly.
- France saw a huge spike in drownings as people tried to beat the heat in the water.
- And if you feel like this kind of weather is new, abnormal, you're right.
- And if there are any doubt, we've just launched the Reuters Climate Monitor, which is an interactive
- map that tracks just how abnormal the current high temperatures are across the globe.
- So on today's On Assignment, we'll sit down with Ben Welsh, the data journalist behind
- the project, to break down what the data actually shows, how unusual this moment really is,
- and what it tells us about where this summer, and our climate, is headed next.
- I'm your host, Jonah Green.
- Ben Welsh is an investigative journalist who focuses on data-driven reporting and newsroom
- tools.
- And he joins us here today on the show.
- Thanks for coming on, Ben.
- Thanks for having me.
- I'm excited to be here.
- That's the spirit.
- Where are you currently?
- Is it also very hot where you are?
- I'm talking to you right now from Money Making Manhattan, the center of it all, where I work
- many days in the Times Square newsroom, but I'm coming to you from my home here on 28th
- Street.
- It looks nice.
- It's a sticky, warm day that we have here today in New York.
- I wouldn't call it pleasant, but it's not as dangerous as the heat we're reporting on
- in other parts of the world.
- Yeah.
- I mean, it is, I was in New York a few days ago, it was oddly cool, which was a weird contrast
- because New York City, especially, is no stranger to these disgustingly hot, humid summers.
- And it's not uncommon for it to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 37 centigrade.
- But Europe seems to be having a really hard time with these numbers.
- And as you see the death toll coming out of these countries, why is Europe struggling
- so much with this kind of heat?
- Well, currently, there's a high pressure system, not to get too nerdy right away out the gate,
- but there's a dome, there's a kind of air trapped over Europe, what's called an Omega
- wave, I'm told.
- Or it's really just a big bubble of hot air that has dried out the area and has brought
- those temperatures up to highs that are rarely seen in that part of the world.
- And there's one forecaster in France who's saying it's the highest temperature ever recorded.
- We'll see if that holds up as people scrub the data in the coming days.
- But it's really hot.
- You might live in a place where 90 degrees Fahrenheit doesn't seem that hot to you.
- And I think it's the to you and to them that's the key piece of it.
- Because heat is dangerous for absolute reasons to talk in a mathy way, a high number is a
- high number.
- But it's also relative to where you live.
- And that has to do with the infrastructure of where you live.
- Do you have air conditioning?
- Yes or no.
- And also kind of cultural factors having to do with people's lifestyle, do they spend
- a lot of time indoors or outdoors and do they are they practiced at protecting themselves
- from heat?
- Why is El Nino so powerful this year?
- Sure.
- So El Nino is a cyclical thing that's been going on long before you and I are born.
- Basically, every few years, the sea temperature, the heat in the water, you know, in the eastern
- Pacific kind of by Peru and Central America, just south of the United States and Mexico
- will heat up.
- And that process, which is about every two to seven years, has a ripple effect that goes
- off across the entire globe, leading to lots and lots of different changes to our weather
- that have become fairly predictable as scientists have tested it and measured it through the
- years.
- And one thing it does is it leads to a weaker hurricane season, typically, though you still
- can have dangerous hurricanes in an El Nino year.
- It leads to more rainfall in Southern California and at maybe the most global level, it tends
- to lead to higher temperatures all across the planet and in a few particular places
- as well.
- And so as of this week, the U.S. Weather Service is saying we are entering our first El Nino
- in several years.
- It's you know, no one can know precisely how big it will be.
- But due to some of the trends we've seen over the last few decades, the expectation and
- the forecast is it will be one of the largest on record, which some are dubbing the super
- El Nino.
- If that comes to pass, it's predicted that we may see the hottest months and years on
- record as a result in the days ahead.
- And making people uncomfortable or causing death in certain cases, for those who are
- more vulnerable.
- What does this kind of heat do, you know, globally to supply chains, food production,
- migratory patterns?
- Like, give us a sense of the disruption that we may not even be aware of.
- Yeah, I mean, it's just like climate change itself, it can be a slow and difficult to
- directly observe kind of patterns, but we know that there's all kinds of shifts to where
- people live, how they're living, agriculture, how the natural ecosystem and other animals
- besides humans are living and moving, all kind of adds up to these larger scale changes
- over time that we expect to unfold.
- And it's hard to it's hard to directly measure that or understand and see all of it happening.
- But as the global climate system changes, the world will evolve and adapt to match that
- gradually.
- And so a lot of us just kind of feel like it's hotter than we remember, and I think
- the data bears that out.
- But hopefully you have put together this database for where it is called the Climate Monitor
- to visualize just how much hotter it is compared to historic averages.
- Tell me about this project and how it works and why it came about.
- Sure, I think you framed it pretty well there.
- I can't speak for everyone watching and listening, but I suspect that many people out there in
- Listenerland have woken up to a high weather forecast in the area where they lived and
- thought to themselves, "Hey, has it always been this hot here this time of year?
- Could it be climate change?
- Is this weird?"
- And I think that more and more people are asking themselves that question on a day-to-day
- basis, and we wanted to try to help people find the answer.
- And so what we've done is we've created a new website called the Reuters Climate Monitor,
- which is it updates daily and it takes the weather forecast for everywhere on Earth,
- and it compares today's high temperature to what used to be normal in that same place
- about a century ago with kind of the oldest available data that we have and what a climate
- scientist would call the "normal temperature."
- And so you're able to on any given day say, "Here's the high now, and here's what the
- high typically used to be in the same place."
- That's plotted out on the map so you can see patterns across the whole world, and it wouldn't
- surprise you if you were to look at it today and you were following the news to see that
- there's a big red spot over Europe right now where the temperatures are highly unusual for
- this time of year in those areas.
- And just to give you some specifics, you can look at some of the cities in northern Spain
- on the Atlantic coast, which are actually kind of the cooler part of Spain historically,
- are seeing highs come in this week that are nearly double what the temperature kind of
- typically was in those same places between 1960 and 1990, which is the comparison period
- that we use.
- That's unbelievable.
- Yeah, I was playing with it earlier, and it's pretty shocking just to see it laid out so
- clearly to show that yes, the world is getting hotter than it used to be.
- It's not our imagination, and you can see that very clearly on the graph.
- Let's see, I'm going to try to put in Paris here to see what this brings up.
- Yeah, today's high forecast is 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 38 degrees in centigrade.
- That is way above normal, and if you zoom in on the graph next to it, you could see
- every month the temperature average is above normal.
- This month so far it's 12 degrees, and then you have this nifty graph below kind of showing
- the noise of many years past, but the blue line represents a normal average year, and
- the red is this year, which is very high.
- That chart shows you the entire globe in contrast to just Paris, but when you zoom in on any
- place you can get the same comparison against a normal year for more than two million locations
- on the planet using the data set that we've taken from the European Climate Agency.
- How did you compile this?
- We built it entirely using open source data created by the European Weather Agency.
- American listeners and watchers may be familiar with the National Weather Service, which is
- the United States kind of government-funded forecasting unit.
- There's a similar operation in Europe that actually has what scientists will tell you
- is the most authoritative record of Earth's temperatures for not just the planet as a
- whole but for any location on Earth going back to 1940, and that database is the core
- and the foundation of almost all climate science, but because it is generated using supercomputers
- and is highly sophisticated, it takes five days for it to generate today's temperatures.
- Today's temperatures won't enter that data set until five days from now.
- The result of that has been that almost all climate science and reporting that's done,
- not just in the news media but in the scientific community, tends to have a delay in it.
- You're usually hearing about the high temperature last month or last week or last year, and
- it's often delivered you in kind of the arcane statistics of an average temperature.
- I doubt there's anyone out there that wakes up in the morning and asks themselves, "What
- will the average temperature be today?"
- That number is really useful when you're trying to look at the global trend at the highest
- possible level, but it doesn't help the average person get the context that they're looking
- for on the life that they're living or to help them better understand what's going on
- in Europe right now if they're not there.
- What we've tried to do is bridge that gap by taking today's weather forecast put out
- by the same agency and doing a simple comparison of those two.
- Now, there's some statistical procedures you go through to take two different models and
- compare them.
- We interviewed and worked with some of the world's leading climate scientists to make
- sure we got all the math right and did it the correct way, but the result is by taking
- today's forecast and comparing it to that historic record, we're able to do in real
- time and ahead of time tell you how unusual today's temperatures are for any place on
- Earth.
- That's the most novel thing scientifically in our Humble project is putting those two
- data sets together from the same agency in this new way.
- This heat wave, this El Nino, this supercharged heat, and this aberration of average temperatures,
- this is climate change.
- Yes.
- Well, what is climate change is a wonderful philosophical question.
- I think it means different things to different people over time.
- One thing a lot of experts emphasize is that the word climate change was selected and is
- popularized because it has a broad application.
- It can mean things getting hotter and in some cases maybe things getting colder or other
- parts of the climate changing besides temperature, looking at other things that go on with the
- atmosphere and in our oceans.
- Climate change broadly is used to encompass all of those things.
- I think that what we're primarily measuring thus far, we do want to add a lot of stuff
- in the future we haven't got to yet, but what we're primarily focusing on so far is really
- what used to be called more commonly, you don't hear as much anymore as global warming,
- which is just the planet gradually getting warmer over time, which there is just overwhelming
- evidence for and the data sets we're bringing to bear here are ones that we hope will try
- to help the average person better see and understand what the numbers have to tell us.
- Yeah.
- What does a data reporter do?
- It's a great question, I wish I got asked it more often.
- What does a data reporter do?
- I would say that we use STEM, science, technology, math skills to find and tell stories.
- And that could mean downloading a spreadsheet and analyzing it and sorting it and then seeing
- who's in the number one spot on the list and giving them a phone call.
- And so it's about, to me, kind of a smarter or more scientific form of really traditional
- journalistic techniques.
- And so we're trying to use our technical skills to, like I said, find and tell stories.
- So like another example on our desk just today, which is Tuesday, is we have a new public
- opinion poll from our partner at Ipsos on how Americans feel about the president's performance
- and the outcome thus far of the war in Iran.
- And that, you know, public opinion polling is a statistical sample that we're doing and
- then trying to find the story out of the headline and bring it across to our readers.
- And a fun thing about being a data reporter is because you're a specialist and you have
- some of those skills that help you do things that maybe not everybody knows how to do,
- but you're able to cover a lot of different topics.
- And so a fun thing about being a data reporter is you can cover public opinion one day, you
- can cover economics another, and you can cover climate the next.
- And it seems especially valuable now, if I may, given the kind of divisive political
- scene we have here, especially in the U.S. and the fragmented media landscape in which,
- you know, various news agencies can sort of portray their own reality.
- And so, but you are, you are operating, at least the goal here is within the realm of
- the objective.
- That's the goal.
- The reader can be the judge on how well I'm doing.
- And I welcome their critiques and, you know, obviously just to say it, numbers and statistics
- can and have very frequently been used to mislead people, you know?
- And so they are, you know, not unimpeachable or undefeated on the field of play.
- But as someone who's just trying to learn new things every day and share those things
- with our readers to try to be able to verify what we're doing and convince people that
- they should maybe consider learning from it, you know, showing your work, being clear and
- verifiable, you know, and hopefully convincing is what data can help you do.
- And it doesn't mean every data, every data analysis follows that or achieves that.
- But it's a tool that we use to try to do better journalism.
- Check out the website, guys, Reuters Climate Monitor, send me your bug reports.
- Yeah.
- Let me put all your complaints in the YouTube comments.
- Thanks again to Ben for his time in reporting.
- Music for this episode was by Josh Sommer with sound design and editing help from Jonathan
- Stayers and Alex Sommer.
- Our podcast team also includes Kim Vannell, Gail Issa, David Spencer, Christopher Wall-Jasper,
- Mindy Burroughs, Sharon Reich-Garson, Abisoya Adelousi, Ethan Plotkin and Eliza Davis-Beard.
- Our senior producers are Tara Oakes, Carmel Crimmins and me, Jonah Green.
- Our executive producer is Leela De Kretzer.
- For daily news around the world, check out our sister podcast, Reuters World News, which
- we now publish seven days a week.
- And we'll be back next weekend with another On Assignment.
- (dramatic music)
Understanding Europe’s heatwave
By Ben Welsh • • Reuters On Assignment in YouTube