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00:00 September temperatures around the globe were record-breaking,
00:03 as they have been for the last five months.
00:06 In a newly published report, the European Climate Agency
00:09 writes that last month the anomaly was even greater,
00:13 at almost a full degree centigrade above the average.
00:16 Antonia Kerrigan joins us on set for a closer look.
00:20 Antonia, this is worrying on so many levels.
00:24 Absolutely.
00:25 In short, as you say, what we've seen
00:27 is rising temperatures across the board,
00:29 including in the summer.
00:30 But more specifically, September was the furthest removed
00:33 from what we might call normal, the most anonymous,
00:35 the most unseasonable, you might say, unseasonably warm.
00:39 We look at this graph released by the Copernicus Climate
00:42 Change Programme.
00:43 The horizontal axis reflects what
00:46 we might call a normal temperature.
00:47 That's the average from 1990 to 2020.
00:50 So we're already looking, of course, at a warmed planet.
00:53 And these are the deviations from that.
00:56 And as you can see, there's an upward trend,
00:59 but 2023 was a real spike.
01:02 Scientists are saying that this is very worrying.
01:05 One has said, Gonsifaras has said
01:07 that it's a death sentence for people and ecosystems.
01:10 Now, that may sound like rhetoric.
01:11 It's not just rhetoric.
01:12 One example is that only yesterday, Public Health France
01:17 released its figures for deaths in September 2023,
01:23 in this offending month.
01:25 And they said that there were 60 excess deaths
01:28 in the period that included an eight-day heat
01:31 wave early in September.
01:32 Now, we can't attribute all of those deaths
01:34 necessarily to the heat.
01:36 But it's a trend that's not explained elsewhere.
01:38 So that's particularly worrying.
01:41 September also represented 1.75 degrees warmer
01:46 than pre-industrial levels.
01:47 Now, of course, we remember from 2015 commitments
01:51 made in the Paris Agreement, the magic number
01:53 we need to stay under is 1.5 degrees of warming.
01:57 And the UN has also come out today
01:59 with a report, a global stocktake,
02:02 to preempt the talks that are coming up to the COP28,
02:04 of course, saying that we're on track for 1.7 degrees
02:07 of warming.
02:08 So this month of September wasn't wholly unrepresentative.
02:12 And I think what's really frightening is it's not--
02:15 from what I understand, it's not just an issue of heat,
02:17 of being hotter.
02:18 It's also what that means for precipitation, drought,
02:22 flooding.
02:23 You know, the more drought--
02:25 we saw in Greece and in Turkey this summer, right?
02:27 There's several years accumulated drought.
02:30 And then when it does rain, the rain
02:32 can't be absorbed in the soil because it's so dry.
02:34 And then you have these massive flooding after a wildfire.
02:38 And it's almost like catastrophe after catastrophe,
02:42 which isn't necessarily just the temperatures.
02:45 I mean, it's everything around it.
02:46 Well, the big problem then as well
02:48 is that all of our climate action
02:49 has to be divided between what we call mitigation, which
02:52 is axing fossil fuels, reducing our emissions,
02:55 and of course, adaptation, which is accepting
02:57 there is this increase.
02:58 We're already seeing the effects, the human effects,
03:01 the ecological effects, and that we
03:02 need to adapt our lives to be able to live within that
03:05 and manage that.
03:06 And so that's a real balance that they're
03:07 going to have to strike ongoingly
03:08 at COP28, balancing between adaptation and mitigation.
03:12 Yeah, and so much of the time that adapting
03:14 involves non-ecologically friendly necessarily, right?
03:18 So anyway, big conundrum.
03:21 And good luck to those trying to figure that one out.
03:22 Thank you so much, Antonia Kerrigan, for joining us.