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GENEVA / EUROPE HEATWAVE RECORDS
STORY: GENEVA / EUROPE HEATWAVE RECORDS
TRT: 1:12
SOURCE: UNTV CH
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH /NATS
DATELINE: 26 JULY 2019, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Exterior shot, Palais des Nations
2. Wide shot, panel and journalists
3. Med shot, hand writing
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Clare Nullis, spokesperson, WMO:
“Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg and the Netherlands all saw new national temperature records as temperatures passed the 40-degree Celsius mark. Paris recorded its hottest day on record, with a temperature of 42.6-degrees Celsius at 4:30 in the afternoon. This is unprecedented.”
5. Med shot, journalists typing
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Claire Nullis, spokesperson, WMO:
“What’s significant is that, when you normally get a temperature record broken, its by a fraction of a degree. What we saw yesterday was records being broken by two, three, four degrees. It was absolutely incredible.”
7. Close up, journalists typing
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Claire Nullis, spokesperson, WMO:
“Climate Change has made the record breaking 2018 UK summer 30 times more likely -- by 2050 these are expected to happen every other year. “
9. Close up, journalists typing
10. Close up, journalists typing
11. Wide shot, panel and journalists
The intense heatwave in Europe shattered many temperature records on Thursday (25 Jul). While some countries – such as the United Kingdom – experienced their hottest July day, others reported their highest temperatures ever, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
“Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg and the Netherlands, all saw new national temperature records as temperatures passed the 40-degree Celsius mark,” said WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis in Geneva today. “Paris recorded its hottest day on record, with a temperature of 42.6-degrees Celsius at 4:30 in the afternoon. This is unprecedented,” she said.
Temperatures kept climbing to new peaks during the afternoon across large swathes of Europe.
“What’s significant is that when you normally get a temperature record broken, it’s by a fraction of a degree. What we saw yesterday was records being broken by two, three, four degrees. It was absolutely incredible,” Nullis said.
According to experts, large-scale movements of hot air are coming up from North Africa and Spain and are expected to push temperatures up in Greenland, further contributing to the melting of the ice sheet. This month alone – according to a Danish climate expert -- 160 billion tonnes of ice have already been lost through surface melting.
Increasingly frequent, intense and widespread heatwaves carry the signature of man-made climate change, according to the WMO. This is consistent with scientific findings that show evidence of greenhouse gas concentrations leading to a rise in global temperatures. Using temperatures in the United Kingdom as an example of how climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather events, Nullis said that “climate change has made the record-breaking 2018 UK summer 30 times more likely -- by 2050 these are expected to happen every other year.”
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is likely that human influence has more than doubled the probability of occurrence of heat waves in some locations. Nullis said that climate change scenarios by the Swiss National Centre for Climate Services warns that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase over the next 30 years, average summer temperatures could be as much as 4.5 °C higher than they are now.
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