David Shukman on Climate Change, Extreme Heat and How We Respond

In this episode of The Science Intersection, I speak with David Shukman, former BBC science editor and author of The Response, about what climate change means for everyday life and how people, communities and governments can respond.

David talks about his years reporting on science, climate and environment, the stories that changed how he understood climate change, and why the conversation needs to move beyond abstract global targets into the lived reality of homes, hospitals, schools, transport, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves.

We discuss why the UK is not yet prepared for a hotter and more unstable climate, how extreme weather is already affecting London and other parts of the country, and why simple adaptations from external shading to better preparedness could make a real difference.

David also reads a powerful extract from The Response about Tony, an elderly man trapped in his basement flat during a London flood, and reflects on why stories can make climate risk feel more human, urgent and memorable.

If you find this episode useful, please share it, follow the podcast, and consider supporting The Science Intersection through the donation link in the show notes.

You can find David Shukman’s book, The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes, through Penguin/Ebury, Waterstones, London Review Bookshop, Hive, or your local bookshop.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:11

So for this podcast episode, I'm here with David Shookman, who has been a correspondent for the BBC and was the BBC's first science editor, and he now works independently and has written a book about the response to climate change. So you spent many years reporting on science, climate, and the environment in the BBC. Is there a particular story from that time that changed how you understood climate change or how you thought it was a couple of years?

SPEAKER_00 0:43

When I started this kind of reporting 23 years ago, I have to confess I was a little bit cynical about whether things could be that bad. I mean, would global warming really be that serious? So I set out to visit many of the frontline research teams working in the field. And what I saw really stunned me, actually. First of all, the teams doing the research were really diligent and careful. They didn't leap to conclusions and say, oh yes, this is all climate change. They really wanted the hard data that could convince policymakers. And secondly, I saw for myself repeatedly the scale and speed of change. Amazing over the years to watch how the Greenland ice sheet, for example, has retreated, to see the thawing of the permafrost and the release of vast quantities of methane in Siberia. And so time after time, I saw how the scientists were anchoring their conclusions in really careful, painfully gathered data and evidence. And then I also saw the effects of that. Really striking, and perhaps this was a pivotal moment, to stand pretty well waist deep in mud in a Bangladeshi village on the coast where a cyclone had ripped open holes in the sea wall, protecting the village and its fields from the seawater. And at low tide, gangs of villagers were forming human chains, passing handfuls of mud to try to fill the holes in these breaches in the seawall. And it was just really striking to see that this is a lived reality. People were facing tougher and tougher conditions as the extremes of weather were becoming more extreme. And I realised that not only is the planet changing rapidly in dangerous ways, but of course that our activity is the principal cause of that.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

So what made you go from looking at climate change and basically the impacts of climate change to looking at how we can respond and kind of mitigate against the impacts of climate change?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

When probably most of my BBC career reporting on this, I'd always thought globally. And scientists often said that Britain would be one of the last places to feel the impacts and that I'd be better off going to the Arctic or Little Pacific Islands. And I did that, along with my contemporaries in other news organizations. That was the kind of pattern of things. And then just very recently, mainly because I got talking to the team writing something called the London Climate Resilience Review, which was a study of climate risks to London, which weirdly hadn't been done before. And I heard things which were new to me about the severity of climate impacts. When we hit 40 degrees in July 2022, one of London's major hospital complexes completely lost its IT because the air conditioning overheated major rail networks across the country, the two main lines linking London to Scotland packed up because the rails were buckling in the heat. Steel can get 50% hotter than the air temperature. Once a piece of track was measured at 62 degrees. And then at the same time, a staggering number of wildfires erupted, even in the London area. One thinks of wildfires perhaps in California or Australia or in more rural parts of the UK. They've been a problem for a long time. But here we had wildfires in the London area, in London suburbs, playing fields, parks were erupting in flame, and actually burnt down 40 houses in the London area, the largest loss of housing in Britain to wildfire. And so it really hit me that we're just not ready, that the public certainly aren't ready. Many of the emergency responders, like the fire brigades, they weren't ready and possibly still aren't. And time and again you just see that the institutions of the local authorities, national government, aren't geared up for what is in effect our arrival in a new and more hostile climate.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

You've written a book about tackling the impacts of climate change, which is called The Response. And you kind of focus on how people, communities, and governments are responding to it. So what do you think is being done? And what do you kind of think that people could be doing more of? And the book has only been out since May, so it's still early days, but what kind of response has it had so far?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

I was delighted to see that there was a hearing of a House of Commons Select Committee investigating the threat of wildfires and what we can do about them. And one of the people who gave evidence to that committee in Parliament actually held up a copy of my book to say if you want to understand the impact of wildfires, how they're a threat, and how we can tackle them, you could do a lot worse than reading chapter one of my book. So I was very, very pleased to see that kind of recognition. I I think I've just tried to speak about it to a variety of audiences, climate scientists, uh policy makers. I addressed a group of local authority, civil servants uh the other day. I think lots of people who may have perhaps on a smallish scale, but nevertheless have some influence or power. And I think that because I think the first point to make is we need to recognize that the climate we live in is different to what we've perhaps grown up with. It is more challenging, and we need to be far more prepared. We need to be more agile in our thinking about how we how we deal with these things. One thinks global warming, and the emphasis is often on the word global. I think it's really useful to think of all of this on a more personal level. What does it mean for me or my family or my home right now? And I think if we bring it down to the individual level, it'll make it much more intelligible to people. Heat wave last week that that that hit much of the country. I mean, it was really oppressive. A thousand schools had to close, six hospitals had to declare major incidents because there was overheating. Often they lost their IT systems or critical functions, the railways were in trouble again. A whole load of things went wrong, which I think perhaps brought it home to people that if you think about climate change, it needn't be abstract or about the future. It's very much about lived experience here and now. And I think the more we can anchor that discussion in those terms, everyday language, everyday experience, I think it might help people come to recognize what's at stake.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

So you're talking about everyday experience, use a lot of stories to basically illustrate what the issues are in terms of what's happening with climate change. Would you be able to read one of those stories from the book?

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Happy to. And the bit I've picked, if I can just set the scene. One of the aspects of global warming or rising temperatures that people don't often know about, is that it was established back in the 19th century by a couple of steam power engineers that when air is warmed, it can hold more moisture. And the formula they came up with is if you warm a body of air by one degree, it can hold seven percent more water. And if you look at the rainfall stats over the last 50, 60, 70 years in Britain and around the world, you do indeed see that the most intense rains are ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty percent heavier than they were. Basically, our cities on our drains and sewers aren't big enough or resilient enough to handle the kind of volumes of rain that we're seeing. So back in July 2021, a massive convective storm, a summer storm, rolled over London. The Met Office forecast that it would drop a lot of very heavy rain, but they didn't know exactly where. And so the forecasting was not necessarily very helpful to people. And one of the people I interviewed for the book was called Tony, elderly man living in a basement in London. And he he didn't know that he was going to be in any particular danger from this rain. So he was at home and he was watching telly, it was lunchtime on this summer's day, and he suddenly noticed water pouring into his flat. And it very quickly reached his knees and then his waist. And it wasn't pure water, it was sewage. And what had happened was that the rain had filled the sewers, which were now bursting, and seeking lower ground, including Tony's flat. And I'll pick up the story here. He tried to get to his front window to get out, but but this muck, this sewage was pouring in, so he couldn't use that route. The front door was impassable because there was a kind of waterfall, a cascade coming down the external staircase. And the back door, the the glass doors that opened outwards onto his garden, he could see he couldn't open them because the water level outside was higher than that inside. And so I'll pick up the reading, three escape routes, and none of them usable. The water was now up to his chest. I've seen pictures showing a dark line of filth on the walls that marks the maximum height the flood reached, more than one and a half meters. Tony could only breathe by standing on tiptoes. In desperate trouble, he stretched his arms up high, like Jesus, he said, one hand holding his mobile phone. This really felt like the end. No one to hear his shouts, no one coming to help, no way out. An old man suffering surreal terror on a summer's day in one of the richest cities on earth. He rang his sister a last act before going under. He needed to say goodbye, he couldn't think what else to do. I told her I love you. I thought I was gonna die, that I have fifteen minutes of my life left. I'll pick up the story with what happened just at that moment, a young couple from the flat above must have thought, What about the old guy living in the basement? Because they appeared at his front window and urged him to make his way there. By now the incoming flood must have subsided, and by a combination of coaxing him, encouraging him, the couple got Tony to get a shoulder or an arm out of the front window, and they then were able to grab him and haul him to safety. And when I interviewed Tony in his basement, very often as he was telling me this story, he would just stop and and a look of fear would cross his face. And he would be almost kind of struck dumb by the appalling memory of what he'd gone through. And I I would say, look, don't worry, let's I'll leave. And he said, No, no, no, I want to want to tell you this. And it left me with a feeling of real outrage or or even anger that that this could happen. I mean, Britain is a G7 nation. We're one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. We've known about climate change, we've we've known for decades or what this might mean for us, and we know many of the challenges that that rising temperatures will present, are presenting to us. So surely we can do better. And in fact, there are many, many solutions which would prevent someone like Tony from drowning in the basement. And we we know it's a real threat. Eleven people drowned in basements in New York in the last few years. It's a horrible thought. And the official reasonable worst case scenario for this type of flooding in London assumes potentially 40 deaths. And I like to think that we're a society that might be governed by the best evidence, and rather than waiting for a disaster to happen, like 40 drowning in basement flats, we act beforehand and prevent that from happening.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

So I I've been reading through your book. It flows really well, and I like the use of stories. I feel like having stories, one it helps it be more memorable, and two, you kind of empathize more in terms of the situation. And these sort of stories help to build towards a big argument about the climate response. So did that story-led style come naturally from your work as a journalist, or was it something you had to consciously shape when writing the book?

SPEAKER_00 14:44

I've always thought in stories and very often human stories. It's either drummed into us as young reporters, it certainly was to me, was what's the story here? And certainly my own personal motivation is that I would far rather listen to a story or tell a story than be blasted with facts and figures and graphs. I think many people kind of find that they that they grasp a point if it's conveyed in story form. So yeah, no, I I I always had the vision for this book that it would be story-led, and my editors were very keen on that as well. I think it's obvious to me that this would be the best way to do it. So probably the the major part of my research, a part of it involved reading hundreds of official reports and doing lots of interviews with people about data and evidence and the policy responses. But but probably the major effort that that I made, and with the help of a researcher, was finding the people whose stories I could I could get into and relate and give them a voice and allow them to help with the narrative flow. And I'm delighted to hear that it worked for you.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

And when you're writing the response, were there stories, examples, or arguments you considered including, but eventually that's more.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Inevitably, there's a process of editing. I did lots of interviews with people, and for whatever reason, their stories perhaps didn't quite fit, or they maybe repeated another that I had already. And one that sticks in my mind, and I I do regret perhaps not including it, but I can see why the editors suggested that it should come out, which was in a chapter on the implications of insurance, in the sense that more and more people are either finding their insurance premiums for their homes shooting up because of the risk of flooding or wildfire. But also in some places, particularly in the States, you're seeing this insurance companies just refusing cover. And that that's happening now in the UK as well. If people are at grave risk of flooding and they live in a relatively modern house, there's no scheme for them to be covered. And in the course of that, I interviewed a woman who lives in Los Angeles, and she's had to flee from her home multiple times because of wildfires, and is paying a phenomenal sum of money to have insurance. And while we were talking all about that, I suddenly had the idea of asking her, when you have to pack up in a hurry, how do you decide what to take with you if you're evacuating? And she said, I never unpack my most treasured possessions. All her the pictures and mementos of that that she'd accumulated and that her husband had, pictures of their wedding, pictures of their kids, all that kind of stuff. She said she keeps in big plastic boxes ready to be loaded into the car to be driven away to safety. And I I just thought that's amazing. Imagine a scenario where you're so on edge and you're so aware of the threat of wildfire, in her case, but it might be flooding, that you actually never unpack your most precious possessions to put around the house. I I thought that was really really kind of moving. And and I wonder how many people live like that. They're so on the edge of disaster all the time, that they that they never actually display around the house the things that matter to them most. And it that didn't get into the story, but but thanks for prompting me to tell it now. And I just think that's a that's a kind of sign of the times. Perhaps there are more or more people who are living like that now.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

So I suppose with the sort of the impacts of climate change of wildfires and and things like this across the world, are there actually governments that are looking at the evidence and actually mitigating more than, say, we are in the UK?

SPEAKER_00 19:16

A story again from the States and again about wildfire. Someone I interviewed in Colorado was initially furious to receive an email from his insurance company saying, we're not going to cover you against wildfire unless you carry out the following long list of measures to make your property less vulnerable. And then he and his wife discussed it and thought, well, actually, maybe we'll go along with this. So they did what was asked of them and were kind of upset because it meant digging up a lot of plants that they'd they'd installed in their garden and and so forth. But then a few months after doing all this, a fire did come along in their valley, and they had to flee. And they were several days anxiously waiting to find out what had happened, and then they were amazed and relieved to find that their house hadn't burned down, but all their neighbors' houses were destroyed. And so it seemed to me that that's kind of a good example of an insurance company providing an incentive, carrot and stick, to get people to think about the resilience of their own homes. And I think that's a bit of a message, actually. I think we've perhaps grown up expecting the government always to step in to keep us safe. And of course, that has to happen with big, let's say, flood defenses, that has to happen at a governmental scale. But but in addition to that, I think there is an individual responsibility to whether one can be prepared, adopt measures that are actually going to reduce the risk to ourselves. It won't eliminate it, but make a difference. And I think I think if that kind of approach can be applied intelligently across the world, it really will actually make a difference. And I think that's one of the messages of the book.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

So with the the increase in climate events, do you think that societies may start to take the climate crisis more seriously, both in terms of adapting to the impacts already happening and reducing emissions? Or minor future warming.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

And it may be naive, is that as more people, and this is a bad bit, but it might lead to a good bit, suffer from these new extremes of weather, whether it's flooding or or heat waves of the kind we had last week or and might have again next week, or or wildfires, they not only will be motivated to make themselves safer, which is great, and and maybe act in a community way to make their communities safer. But also some might ask the question: well, why are we in this mess? What's driving the change that makes these actions? Essential and might kind of think, oh, maybe that global warming thing, which everyone's been banging on about, maybe there is something in this business of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere and acting as a blanket to make the planet hotter, maybe that's maybe there's something in that. And and maybe that might be a reason to reduce our use of fossil fuels. I mean, I might be naive in that, but I think if the alternatives to fossil fuel-powered machinery, whether it's cars or trucks or whatever, if those alternatives are cheaper and easy, and electric cars are definitely attractive and easy and are becoming much cheaper, as are solar panels, then a lot of those things make sense. Whether you think climate change is a threat or not, does it just make sense to spend less money on motoring, getting around, powering your house? And if in a small way that contributes to reducing the emissions, driving up temperatures, that's also a very good thing. I kind of wonder whether the lived experience actually offers a chance to engage many more people in thinking about this. So it's not just climate scientists or climate activists who are banging the drum for this, but actually many more people think, oh yeah, hang on, this is serious. We've got to do something about it.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

We've kind of talked about people in sort of wider society and focusing on climate change. In terms of the media focusing on climate change, what do you think they get right and what do you think they get wrong with the case? Well, there's a great variety of coverage.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Some is is constructive, it's well-grounded, it's based on the science and reflects the latest scientific evidence. But I'm afraid quite a lot of it is anchored in a different perspective, viewing the the climate word, the phrase climate change or global warming, as part of a culture war. And you saw quite a few dismissing warnings about heat, claiming that everything said about climate change is alarmist, exaggerated, it's got some weird agenda about controlling society, or it's a green scam, or Trump calls it a hoax. And and that that's I think the reality that we live in now, and it's amplified by social media. There's an old saying that a falsehood can travel halfway around the world before truth has got its boots on. And you see time and time again, you know, on social media in particular, but then picked up by some of the papers, some line about, well, the heat wave, we had hotter conditions before, or if it's flooding, well, it's all the fault of ecologists for not dredging the rivers or whatever. And and that can pick up and and go viral before the truth emerges, which which might be very different. So there is a battle constantly to get that truth out there, and it's it's never been so important, it's never been so difficult. And my hope is that if people are finding that actually their kids can't sleep at night because it's too hot, or if they find that the tarmac covering their road is melting and deformed, so they're having trouble driving down it or using it, or all of those things which you know many British homes have kitchen extensions with at the back of the house with lots of glass, almost uninhabitable during a heat wave. I mean, whether these things might encourage the penny to drop and people to go, oh right. And I I'm very keen, wherever possible, and this is borrowing from some great work by an organization called the Potential Energy Coalition, which looks at what language resonates with people. And they found no surprise if you say, we must strive for more mitigation to reduce carbon emissions, to meet our net zero targets to save the planet. It bombs. But if you say, you know, your house might become uninsurable against flooding, or you know your daughter's asthma is made worse by traffic fumes, you you get a very, very different response. And I think I think we need to talk about these things in much blunter and more everyday kind of ways, and not a more bottom-up, rather, you know, what what is the nitty-gritty reality of people's lives rather than this sort of rather overarching abstract global framing, which has generally been how climate change has been discussed in in recent years.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

So your book does quite a good job of talking about the actual impacts on people's everyday lives. Um, one of the things, obviously, sort of thinking about the the recent heat wave your book talks about is the impacts of extreme heat. But do you think we're actually good enough at communicating the risks that these kind of things like extreme heat actually has in terms of our health? And are we starting to put enough pressure in London last week?

SPEAKER_00 27:30

It was London Climate Action Week, and the heat wave lasted all that time. In the first day or so, I noticed that a lot of people were continuing to walk down the streets on the sunny side. There were plenty of people who, like me, chose the shaded side, but it felt evenly split. But by the end of the week, I noticed it was pretty unusual to spot someone on the sunny side, and the the shaded side was always more crowded. And I think that's that's the process of the penny dropping. I think people realizing, hang on, I I actually need to keep out of the heat. And I think we were finding I was just noticing many, many people carrying water, many people using umbrellas, many, many more people in various kinds of sun hats. And of course the dress code changed, people going around in shorts much more than they might have done. So I think there is a process where people think, hang on, how am I gonna may be more comfortable? How am I gonna look after my own safety? But the big problem is that most people don't understand Britain is now becoming a hotter country, but we've yet to borrow from traditionally hot countries the techniques they use to keep their homes cool, which is principally shading. If you go to Spain or Portugal or southern Italy, many of the homes, probably most of the homes, have shutters on the outside of the windows to keep the sun off the glass, to block the sun from blasting in, heating the glass, and then coming into the home. And it's an incredibly effective measure. But very, very few British homes have shutters of that kind. So I've been suggesting to people, including my own son and daughter-in-law in London, draping sheets or duvet covers over windows and glass doors on the outside to act as shutters, and it makes an incredible difference. Someone measured the difference at at ten degrees. If you can just keep the sun off the glass. Now, this is a cultural thing. Very few Brits would think of doing that. And I think the same with the thousand schools that had to shut because it was too hot for the kids and the teachers to be there. If you had awnings or any kind of shade, like at many shops on high streets have awnings that stretch over the pavement. Typically it's greengrocers that have them to keep the sun off the fruit and veg out the front, to allow it to last longer, being shaded and not go off. And we need to apply that kind of thinking to see what hot countries have done over the years and just take the same techniques, and it makes an amazing difference.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

During the the higher temperatures, we have been sort of placing towels on the basically over the windows and stuff like this.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Yeah, towels will lock out the heat. Did you put them on the outside? Because that that's when you re Well, you really get the value if you hang them on the outside. A lot depends on the kind of windows you've got. If there's sash windows, you can you can hang a towel or a sheet outside and then jam it at the at the top when you bring the window up to shut it again. But usually there's a technique for doing but yeah, if you can keep the sun off the glass, that's the absolute key message. And opening the windows at night when it's been very enclosed of the relative difference in temperatures, because you you might think the classic British response is throw open all the windows, but you've got to be very aware of when it actually cools down. So typically it's worth getting up. Well, either staying up late to to benefit from the drop in temperature at night, or getting up really early, or both, and then ventilate the house with the cool air, typically, you know, in the early morning, and then shut everything very firmly and put your deploy your sheets and all the rest of it.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

A huge thank you to David Chookman for joining me on the Science Intersection. In this episode, we've been talking about his book, The Response, and about how climate change is already affecting everyday life from heat waves and flooding to hospitals, schools, homes and the practical steps we can take to adapt. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who might find it useful. Follow the podcast and leave a rating or a view if you can. And if you'd like to support the podcast, there's a donation link in the show notes. Any support helps give me more time to research, record, edit, and produce future episodes. Thanks so much for listening.