--:-- Alex Ritson: This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Saks Off 5th is your secret to fashion's most wanted deals at up to 70% off.
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--:-- Alex Ritson: Go on, get a little out there, into the big heart of Nevada, where you can go off-road and off the map, on two lakes or on horseback. Dip into hot springs and dive into deserts. Climb a mountain or make your best effort. See thousands of stars in some of the darkest skies. Stake out haunted hotels. Can you make it to sunrise? There's always something new to see, because we've got plenty of space to just be. Plan your trip at TravelNevada.com.
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--:-- Alex Ritson: This is a special collaboration between the Global News Podcast and the BBC Weather team. I'm Alex Ritson, and two weeks on from the start of the LA wildfires, we're looking at the increasing and terrifying number of news stories around the world involving extreme weather.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I'm here at the BBC Weather Studio in London with weather reporter and meteorologist Chris Fawkes.
--:-- Chris Fawkes: Hello.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Tell me about what you do.
--:-- Chris Fawkes: So here at the BBC Weather Centre, we produce well over 100 forecasts each day. We broadcast to a couple of hundred million people on TV and radio at the BBC. We're quite a small team, actually. We've got 12 presenters that work here around the clock here at the Weather Centre. And you've got some incredible equipment which we'll tour a little bit later on.
--:-- Alex Ritson: We'll come back to you later in this podcast. We're also going to be joined by our tech editor Zoe Kleinman, Greya Jackson from The Climate Question, Marco Silva from BBC Verify and Myra Anubi from People Fixing the World. We'll be finding out why extreme weather events are on the increase, what role climate change plays, and how we can better predict, contain, and even prevent some of the most devastating results.
--:-- Alex Ritson: But first, let's start with a reminder of why all this matters. The National Weather Service is predicting close to hurricane-force level winds. The anticipated winds, combined with low humidities and low fuel moistures, will keep the fire threat in all of Los Angeles County critical.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Please be patient with those people are saying, I just want to go look at my house and I want to see what's left. We know that, but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbours. In some areas, more than a year's worth of rain fell in just a few hours. It is a catastrophe.
--:-- Alex Ritson: The floods we had in 1982, when I was 10 years old, were a joke compared to what happened here yesterday. Thousands of hectares of farmland have been destroyed and the UN is mourning more than half a million people are in urgent need of food and drinking water.
--:-- Alex Ritson: We already displaced people from war zones and after the floods, we don't have anything left. It's the worst drought I've ever seen in my entire life. While others are carrying huge, heavy bottles of water on their backs, the ground is very, very dry, covered in huge cracks. There's absolutely no water to be seen here.
--:-- Alex Ritson: This is the third storm in a year. Even before the officer got to me, the water was all the way up to my chest. This town is devastated and we need help.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Chris and I have decamped from the BBC Weather Centre and come up to the Global News Podcast studio. Chris, we heard there from the US in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, from the drought in the Amazon in Brazil, from the wildfires in Los Angeles and Portugal, and then the devastating flooding in Valencia in Spain.
--:-- Chris Fawkes: Well, we should start, I suppose, in LA. That's the most recent of our stories. And, you know, here we do get a lot of variability in our weather from one year to the next and actually the last couple of years 2022 and 2023 were wet years in California what this did is actually created pretty good conditions for vegetation to grow now normally in Los Angeles County we get most of the rain falling between October and April in a typical year this year in Los Angeles well between May 2024 and now they've had just four millimetres of rain.
--:-- Chris Fawkes: So they've had barely anything and that's led to severe drought conditions. That's dried out all of the vegetation that's grown rapidly over the last couple of years from those good growing years if you like and it's resulted in these tinderbox dry conditions.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Added to that we've had something called a Santa Ana wind. This is where we get air descending down through the atmosphere. It becomes very dry and warm as it descends. We get high pressure to the east of the mountains, low pressure in the Pacific. That causes the winds to blow and over the tops of the mountains we've seen gusts up to about 99 miles an hour.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And so once these fires started, they spread very, very quickly, not just across the vegetated areas, but throughout whole communities as we've seen.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, and we've had a question from a listener on this. Just take a listen. I am Sachinana from India. How did the fire pick up its intensity? And how did it spread over a wide area, destroying everything in its path and reducing everything to ashes?
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yes. Yeah. How did it happen so quickly? I mean, there's still question marks about what instigated the fire. You know, was it natural? Was it arson? Was it power lines clicking together in those strong winds?
--:-- Alex Ritson: I think there are questions still to be asked about that. But once you start these fires, because those winds are so strong, so dry, so warm, and we've got all of that vegetation that's just there available to burn, we'll add in that persistent wind for day upon day upon day. it makes battling these wildfires extremely difficult and dangerous because you've got embers just flying up into the air.
--:-- Alex Ritson: They can leap over firefighters, setting off new blazes, and you can get all kinds of severe phenomena, even fire tornadoes we've seen mixed in with these, which create some particular hazards.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, 19 out of 20 of the largest wildfires in California have occurred since 2003. And seven of the 10 biggest fires in California have occurred since 2020.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now, one of the central predictions about climate change is that we expect droughts to become more frequent. And so the conditions for these wildfires become more frequent in a warming world. So more of them to come.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And of course, it's not just fires, is it? We heard about another extreme weather event that hit the US last year. And, of course, that was Helene.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, Hurricane Helene was a really interesting storm. It underwent rapid intensification. That's where the winds pick up by 35 miles an hour in 24 hours. Now, this one was even stronger than that. It hits the Big Bend region of Florida as a powerful Category 4 hurricane. 140 mile an hour winds, the strongest ever to hit this part of the United States.
--:-- Alex Ritson: now that caused problems but i think the biggest problems from hurricane helene actually came as it moved inland it weakened significantly into a normal area of low pressure and you might think well that's it that's the problem's gone away but it wasn't if you consider that water hazards are responsible for 86 percent of fatalities in such tropical systems well it's the water that's the far bigger hazard and this area of low pressure became slow moving in tennessee and it brought enormous falls of rain in the mountains of north carolina we recorded 30.78 inches of rain 780 millimeters of rain and that led to catastrophic flooding and hurricane helene became the deadliest hurricane to reach the mainland united states since hurricane katrina way back in 2005
--:-- Alex Ritson: and then there was that terrible drought in the amazon what was going on there yeah well this one's interesting because it's partly driven by climate change, partly driven by natural events. So as we heard a moment ago, droughts become more frequent in a warming world and that's the background that we're in in our current climate.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Temperatures globally are about 1.3 degrees Celsius higher than they were during the pre-industrial period. So that makes droughts more likely. Coupled with that, we've got a natural phenomenon going on, El Nino.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now, in 2003, 2004, we had an El Nino pattern. that also reduces rainfall. So it was the combined effect here that caused the severe drought, with quite a few rivers in the Amazon basin actually reaching their lowest level on record last year.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I have to say things are slowly improving now because we are going into the rainy season and we're starting to see the drought ease in parts of Brazil, which I suppose is good news. But yeah, climate change does increase the risk of such droughts.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, talking of rainy seasons, everyone will remember the images of the flooding in Spain. Cars literally being tossed around like toys, more than 220 people dead. And there were complaints about the way officials handled it, weren't there?
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, there are questions, I suppose, that still remain about the floods that hit Valencia. I mean, there was a huge amount of rainfall in just eight hours, about a year's worth of rainfall, 491 millimetres of rain, and that led to some catastrophic flooding.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I've been looking back, though, at the performance of the local weather authorities, AMET. They're the Spanish forecasting authorities. And in the days ahead, they actually predicted this area of low pressure. They called it a Dana weather event. And they do get these several times during the year. But they highlighted this one was going to be particularly bad.
--:-- Alex Ritson: In the morning of the floods, they had a top level red weather warning that was in force. So they were expecting some severe flooding. But what came was enormous amounts of rain. And I think if we look at this area of Spain, we've had deadly floods that happened back in 1957 and 1982. So they don't come along too often, but when they do, they can be absolutely devastating.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And I think what we see with this weather event is an enormous amount of rain coming in a short space of time. The rivers in this part of Spain run off the land very, very quickly. So you don't necessarily get a lot of warning before a wave of water hits your properties and your communities.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So I think the main questions that still are to be asked really about this are about when the public received warnings from the government, both the national governments and the regional governments, the way that the water levels were monitored in these river catchments, given that the history of flooding and how quickly the flooding comes on in this part of the world.
--:-- Alex Ritson: and of course like a lot of places around the world we've seen quite a bit of construction in what are known to be flood prone areas so there are questions that remain about this flooding
--:-- Alex Ritson: I can look back here in the uk back in 2007 following the catastrophic floods we had here in the uk there was a pit review that was done by Lord Pitt and he recommended a much closer collaboration between the Met Office which is the UK Forecasting Authority, and the Environment Agency, which is responsible for issuing flood warnings.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And that resulted in the setting up of the Flood Forecast Centre, which is manned by hydrometeorologists. What they do is they can take weather data, forecast data, and model what the response of the rainfall is likely to be on individual river catchments. And so that's led to a much more joined up approach and we're much better at forecasting floods these days.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So there could be questions about how we go about forecasting floods in other parts of the world in the future.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, that's fascinating because definitely the complaint at the time, I just remember the stories that we were running, was that people, even if the information had been there, they didn't feel they'd been warned.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, that's right. I've read reports of people actually getting notified on their mobile phones about the flooding when it was happening, when the rain was already coming down. But from a meteorological point of view, at least there were red-level weather warnings, top-level weather warnings that were issued the morning that day, so actually hours before the flooding event hit.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So being able to provide people with enough warning that an extreme weather event is coming is a key part of limiting their impact.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So I'm back in the BBC Weather Centre with Chris Fawkes. And Chris, how does this work? How does weather prediction work? Show me your machines.
--:-- Alex Ritson: A lot of the stuff that we do starts off with the computer models that model the atmosphere and the numbers involved in these computers are truly staggering. The UK Met Office supercomputer that crunches all the numbers can do 14,000 trillion sums a second, taking in 215 billion weather observations every day.
--:-- Alex Ritson: That's enough for 2 million sums for every man, woman and child on the planet. So the numbers are immense. There are a million lines of code that go into these computer programs and what comes out is a simulation of what we think the weather is going to look like.
--:-- Alex Ritson: But even after all of those calculations, we all know that sometimes the weather doesn't quite go to plan. And so one of my jobs as a forecaster is to look at the computer model outputs, take a look at things like satellites or weather observations, and I have these available to be right the way around the world, and actually go and have a look.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So, Chris, obviously I am not an expert in this like you. What I see on the screen is it's a huge map of Europe. I can see, I imagine those are the clouds just off the coast of Spain. but what I can't really tell as someone who isn't an expert is what all this means.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Show me what I should be looking at.
--:-- Chris Fawkes: Okay, so what we're looking at here is the Mediterranean basin so we can see the satellite picture. The white is the cloud here and this particular area of cloud is actually a named storm. It's been named by the Italian meteorological authorities and if I zoom in I can see the structure of the cloud, not just that but I can actually see these weather observations.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now these come to us from right the way around the world. The ones we're looking at here are actually on the north coast of Algeria. And the numbers here tell me that we've got some very, very heavy rain at the moment across northern Algeria. And this is one area we're watching to see if there might be some flooding over the next few days.
--:-- Alex Ritson: It just looks like a fluffy cloud on the screen. But it's when you click on there and then I guess you're right clicking, aren't you? And then the numbers come up, which give you that backstory.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yes, so I'm zooming in and all of these circles you can see are around the world actually. I can zoom right out and show you right the way around the planet. Wow, what power. Go to Singapore, they've got some thunderstorms there at the moment.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So these are the actual observations that people are recording. So Chris, that's what we have currently. I'm going to go and see Zoe Kleinman.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Can you come with me, our technology editor? Let's see where she thinks the technology might be evolving.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So, Zoe, you're on the line. How are you doing?
--:-- Zoe Kleinman: I'm good, thank you.
--:-- Alex Ritson: This is such a good topic, I think, because as someone who lives in a particularly cold and wet part of the world, weather prediction is very important to me in terms of where I go, what I wear and what I take with me when I go out.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Well, Chris and I have just been looking at the finest state-of-the-art current weather prediction technology, but you're the expert on what's going to come, aren't you? How's it going to change?
--:-- Zoe Kleinman: I think weather prediction is getting more accurate and it's going to increasingly get easier. And the reason for that, it might not surprise you to hear, is artificial intelligence.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I want to tell you about a really interesting tool that we've just had some new research on published last month. It's called Gencast and it was made by Google DeepMind in the UK. And it's basically an AI programme that does weather predictions. And it performed 20% better in tests than the current world leader.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And what's really interesting about it, not only was it better and more accurate on day-to-day forecasts, it was also more accurate on extreme event prediction up to 15 days in advance. And it was better at predicting the paths of hurricanes, which, as we know, can change quite dramatically at very short notice.
--:-- Alex Ritson: It was trained on 40 years of weather data, which is an awful lot of data and also contained an awful lot of variables. And it used that data to make its own predictions. It does the same as traditional predictions, by the way, which is called ensemble forecasting, where you get a range of them. But it was calculating which one was the most probable and it was very good at it.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Traditionally, forecaster tools involve basically solving enormous amounts of equations. And they use supercomputers to do it because they have to, but it still takes a long time. And Gencast managed to process its forecasts in eight minutes, which is considerably faster, isn't it?
--:-- Alex Ritson: But, of course, the data it was using had been gathered and processed in all of our old school ways that we've been doing for the last 40 plus years. And so what we don't know is whether going forward, if we were to just rely on AI generated data, because that would become, wouldn't it, our data set, whether it would be as reliable.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So we talk a lot about the impact of artificial intelligence on everything from medical diagnoses to even lyric writing. Is AI making a difference in predicting the weather too?
--:-- Zoe Kleinman: I think it's certainly got the potential to do that. And we're going to see more and more companies focusing on that. I guess one of the ironies is that it might end up being matters related to climate change that could hold it back because we know that AI is a very power hungry tech. It's very energy hungry. It needs banks of computers in massive data centres to run it. And a lot of those at the moment require large quantities of water to keep them cool.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And so although there is hope that perhaps it will come up with solutions to the climate change problem that we haven't yet thought of, there is an environmental price tag attached that is currently quite high. And some experts question whether we can actually afford it in terms of the Earth's resources.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Chris, do you find this exciting? Do you see your job changing?
--:-- Chris Fawkes: I'm sure it will change in the future. You know, every time there's been available extra computing power, we've seen a step change in the forecasting capabilities. And I don't suppose AI is going to be any different from that.
--:-- Alex Ritson: However, I have looked at some AI models from time to time when the forecasts have been difficult. And I've gone back and looked what had been predicted by these AI models on previous days. And, you know, sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I don't see anything groundbreaking at the moment in terms of difference in the day-to-day forecasting whenever I've looked at these models, but I'm sure it will come. It is early days, as they say.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Chris and Zoe, thank you. We'll be back shortly.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Still to come in this podcast. These large, heavy cows are like habitat engineers, so their role here is to eat and move in a way that help us to prevent another wildfire.
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--:-- Alex Ritson: OK, so we've been talking about extreme weather events and forecasting the weather and hovering over it, climate change. So to explain the links and differences, Greya Jackson of The Climate Question is here.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Hello Greya, what's the difference between weather and climate?
--:-- Greya Jackson: Yeah, it's a great question. So the main difference is we looking at timescales. So when we talking about the weather we talking about short events maybe days maybe weeks at most. When we talking about climate change we're talking about really long-term studies. We're looking at averages over a year, maybe even a decade.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And the other key difference is that climate change is solely driven by humans' behaviour.
--:-- Greya Jackson: When we drive around our petrol cars or burn our coal fires or cook on gas, These are all emitting planet warming gases which are causing our planet to warm. 1.6 degrees warmer, in fact, than pre-industrial times. That's new data from Copernicus, EU's climate service, just recently.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So two real differences, sort of the length of time we're looking at, but also climate change is solely driven by our actions.
--:-- Alex Ritson: If it's not a stupid question, why does climate change cause extreme weather? It's not a stupid question at all, Alex. It's a great question, I think.
--:-- Greya Jackson: And, you know, we can look at it in lots of different ways, depending on what extreme weather we're talking about. But if you take heat as an example, as the daily temperature shifts to warmer levels, hotter days become more likely and more intense.
--:-- Alex Ritson: What does that mean for things like fires? Well, longer lasting heat waves draw more moisture out of the soils and vegetation that creates very dry conditions, you know, perfect fuel and tinder for fire that can spread at incredible speed.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I mean, particularly if the winds are really strong, just like we've been seeing in LA. But with all that moisture being drawn out of the ground, out of lakes, rivers, the vegetation, we get more moisture in the atmosphere.
--:-- Alex Ritson: For every one degree of rise in average temperature, we see about 7% more moisture in the atmosphere. And with more vapour in the air, that means rainfall can become even heavier.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So there's lots of different ways in which climate change is making weather more extreme.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So how much extreme weather is caused by climate change? So we can say broadly that extreme weather is becoming more likely and more extreme in a warmer world.
--:-- Alex Ritson: That's according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is where the world's scientists get together and produce gold standard research and publication.
--:-- Alex Ritson: But we did have this major scientific breakthrough two decades ago where scientists began to attribute climate change to a specific weather event. And when you look at it today, they roll out these studies within a few days of a hurricane.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I remember Hurricane Beryl, you know, results came out, I think it was just five days after it made landfall about how much rainfall was made worse by climate change.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And it's really interesting how scientists do this work. There's one particularly prominent group called the World Weather Attribution. They're based at Imperial College London.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And I caught with their lead scientist. She's one of the pioneers of this kind of work, Dr. Freddie Otto, on exactly how they do this. And that was recently on the Climate Question podcast.
--:-- Alex Ritson: We have very good observations and very good records of how many greenhouse gases have been put into the atmosphere in addition to the natural ones since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And then we can take these out of the atmosphere of climate models and find out what's possible weather in the world that might have been without climate change.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And if we, for example, find that a heat wave in today's climate is about a one in 10 year event, but find that without human induced climate change, it would only be a one in a thousand year event, then we can attribute the difference.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So this change in likelihood that this event has been made a hundred times more likely to climate change, because that's the only difference between these two climates that we've looked at.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So, Greya, what is the impact of extreme weather? I mean, it's huge. And typically, it's felt by the poorest among us.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And that's because often poor people don't have the means to evacuate or rebuild after a disaster. Perhaps they don't have insurance on their home or life savings, and they can be left destitute afterwards, especially in places like Bangladesh, where perhaps you can't take your cows or your chickens, your way of life and the way you earn money into a cyclone shelter.
--:-- Alex Ritson: But if you want to put a number on it, the International Chamber of Commerce commissioned a report on the cost of weather. Do you want to have a guess, Alex, at what that figure might be for the last decade?
--:-- Alex Ritson: It's going to be in the trillions, isn't it?
--:-- Greya Jackson: Yeah, it's two trillion US dollars in the decade leading up to 2024.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I mean, the US saw the greatest losses followed by China and India. But I mean, $2 trillion, yes, it sounds like a lot. But actually, there are so many things that we cannot quantify, like the loss of entire ecosystems or even loss of life.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And that loss of life is going to be big. I mean, the World Health Organization says that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause a quarter of million more deaths per year.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And that's purely from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress. That's not including people who are dying in floods or fires like we've been seeing in LA.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Great. Take a listen to this. We've got a question from Avner in Israel that we'd like to put to you. In summits dealing with climate change, leaders from around the globe may commit to ideas their successors would not always like, such as in the case of Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden.
--:-- Alex Ritson: How can that be resolved, assuming the world needs to progress continuously?
--:-- Greya Jackson: That's an interesting question, isn't it? Because politicians, many politicians, don't like spending money if the fruits of that money, if the results aren't seen while they're still in office.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Yeah, I mean, really what your listener is asking is, is democracy up to the task, especially if we see governments flip-flopping about when some are seen as very climate progressive and others are seen as less climate progressive.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And actually, the best answer I've had to this question comes from an expert I spoke to a few years ago, and he said it has to be. Democracy has to be up to the task because people want to have a say in how their country is governed.
--:-- Alex Ritson: There really isn't a good alternative. But the interesting thing about Biden and Trump is that there was still a lot of progress made under Trump's first term, you know, despite the fact that he's said things like drill baby drill and call climate change a hoax.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Back in that first term, solar power more than doubled and wind increased by 50%. And the reason that is, is renewables are far cheaper than oil, coal and gas.
--:-- Alex Ritson: You know, this is what a lot of economists are talking about now, this Great Green March, the economics of renewables make so much sense to the market and that maybe they don't need as much investment, as much subsidising as they previously did.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So what I'm saying is, yes, Trump may in the short term cause more greenhouse gases to go up into the sky, more climate change. But the trajectory in the US and for many other countries in the world is down.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Greer, thank you, Greer Jackson of The Climate Question.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So we know what the scientists say, but there are still people out there who believe man-made climate change and the resulting extreme weather events which we report on are a hoax or conspiracy.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Joining me now is Marco Silva from BBC Verify.
--:-- Marco Silva: Marco, how does that work?
--:-- Alex Ritson: It's a very good question and certainly one that shows how those beliefs can defy logic.
--:-- Marco Silva: So one thing that I've noticed as part of my job covering climate change, mis- and disinformation is that every time these extreme weather events happen, be it heat waves, floods, hurricanes, you name it, there will always be an explosion of misinformation online.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Of course, by misinformation, I mean false and misleading claims being made about these events. And that misinformation can be focused not only on the political response, for example, the aid relief, but also, perhaps more importantly to me, the causes of those events.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now, as we heard Greyer say there, attribution, linking specific extreme weather events to climate change, requires quite a lot of scientific work is difficult. But we can say for sure that many extreme weather events are indeed being made more likely, more intense by climate change.
--:-- Alex Ritson: What some people say online is that they look at these facts and they dismiss them outright. They look at these extreme weather events and say this has nothing to do with climate change. Climate change is a scam. Climate change is a hoax.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And instead, I've seen increasing numbers of people turning to often conspiracy theories to try and make sense of these rather dramatic scenes.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And there are some egregious examples of that, aren't there?
--:-- Marco Silva: Absolutely, absolutely.
--:-- Alex Ritson: I've been telling my colleagues that for the last year, most of my time has been spent covering extreme weather events, where indeed people turn to conspiracy theories to make sense of what happened.
--:-- Alex Ritson: The hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US were one good example, with people suggesting online, wrongly, without any shred of evidence, that these hurricanes, these storms had been engineered into existence.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now, there's no technology available to humankind that allows us to create or control hurricanes, but still those beliefs were there.
--:-- Alex Ritson: More recently in Spain, when flash floods hit the region of Valencia, there too, there were allegations that weather weapons had supposedly been used to create this storm.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Again, there is no evidence to suggest that is the case. And even among the numbers of people who are making these claims, there isn't always consistency about who exactly is deploying these weapons, for what purpose they are being deployed.
--:-- Alex Ritson: But what we do know is that very rarely there is any credible evidence to back such theories.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Just how widespread are these views? You know what? it's rather difficult to quantify just how many people share these views.
--:-- Alex Ritson: What we do know is that whenever these extreme weather events happen and these claims go viral online, posts and videos making these claims are getting millions of views, right?
--:-- Alex Ritson: You have millions of people literally engaging with this type of content.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Now, some people might say, well, this is just social, This is just social media being social media. It doesn't actually transpire to the offline world, as it were.
--:-- Alex Ritson: But we can see in a number of different countries that there are politicians, especially politicians who describe themselves as anti-establishment, politicians who will embrace these narratives, who will themselves platform some of these ideas.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Chris, you're the BBC's weatherman. Does this affect your work?
--:-- Chris Fawkes: Well, the one thing I see quite often on social media, you know, questions directed at us, are around chemtrails. It's the idea that some people have that the government's somehow spraying us from the skies.
--:-- Alex Ritson: It contrails aeroplane contrails These are ice crystals that follow aeroplane engines And of course there a little bit of moisture that comes out from burning fuels at that altitude in the atmosphere
--:-- Alex Ritson: Here's the thing. These things are predictable. If the atmosphere has got quite a bit of moisture in it and you put extra in from aeroplane engines, you get these persistent aeroplane contrails that can last for the most part of a day.
--:-- Alex Ritson: There are other times when the atmosphere is very dry at the kind of height that planes fly at and you'll see very quickly those contrails just evaporating.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So nothing to do with getting sprayed about. That's a complete fallacy, a complete hoax. It is just atmospheric physics. It's just about how much water there is up there in the atmosphere.
--:-- Alex Ritson: So just to be completely clear for the record, you are not part of some global cover-up. I'm not spraying anyone.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Marco, some people might think that these conspiracy theories are just so spurious they're hardly worth our time and attention. Do they have a point? Why do these things matter?
--:-- Marco Silva: Well, before I answer that, it's still worth pointing to Chris and say that colleagues like him, where the presenters have been at the front line of experiencing the results of this misinformation.
--:-- Alex Ritson: As a result of the misinformation that I'm describing here, colleagues like Chris are being harassed on social media. And this is not a preserve of
