Understanding Europe s heatwave

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. In Prague, beleaguered horses cool off in a river. In Paris, overheated shoppers line up to buy fans. Taverine Lebouzit says the 100-degree heat wave has been, quote, 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, you know, 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 at 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. Now, 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, you know, kind of absolute reasons to talk in a mathy way. You know, 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. Like, 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 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. And 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. You know, 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. No one can know precisely how big it will be, but due to some of the 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. Beyond 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 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, you know, the world will evolve and adapt to match that gradually. 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 Reuters 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 listener land have 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 is this is this weird is, you know, 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 quote unquote 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 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 can 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. And 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. So 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. So today's temperatures won't enter that data set until five days from now. And so 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 to you in kind of the arcane statistics of an average temperature. And 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. And so 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. And so that's kind of the most novel thing scientifically in our Humble project is putting those two data sets together from the same agency in this new way. So this heat wave, this El Nino, this kind of 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. And so climate change kind of 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, and you don't hear as much anymore, is global warming, which is just the planet kind of 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 kind of 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 kind of 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 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, 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. But you are operating, at least the goal here, 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 obviously, just to say it, numbers and statistics can and have very frequently been used to mislead people. And so they are 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, showing your work, being clear and verifiable, and hopefully convincing, is what data can help you do. And it doesn't mean 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, and put all your complaints in the YouTube comments. Thanks again to Ben for his time and reporting. Music for this episode was by Josh Sommer, with sound design and editing help from Jonathan Stairs and Alex Sommer. Our podcast team also includes Kim Vannell, Gail Issa, David Spencer, Christopher Wall-Jasper, Mindy Burrows, Sharon Reich-Garson, Abisoya Adelusi, Ethan Plotkin, and Eliza Davis-Beard. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks, Carmel Crimmins, and me, Jonah Green. Our executive producer is Lila DeKretzer. 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.