00:00 Well, we can speak to Vincent-Henri Poucq, the Director of the Copernicus Atmospheric
00:04 Monitoring Service.
00:05 And to get a sense of the context of this, Vincent, your records go back to 1940.
00:11 Tell us about what this data tells us and the patterns you're seeing.
00:16 Yes, so we have a climate monitoring product which is called Reanalysis, which provides
00:24 consistent information since 1940.
00:27 So this allows us to assess anomalies and to compare like for like.
00:33 And this dataset allows us to say with confidence that this month of July, as you explained,
00:41 has been the hottest on record in our dataset, but also looking at the trends since meteorological
00:48 measurements exist.
00:49 Does the data give you any trajectory that continues to allow us to say what we could
00:55 be experiencing in just a few years' time?
00:58 Yes, as you rightly said, it's a big concern, but it's not a surprise.
01:05 The driver for these hot temperatures and these records being broken year after year
01:10 is the emissions of CO2 and methane from fossil fuels.
01:16 And these, they continue to increase year after year.
01:21 It's 37.5 billion tonnes of CO2 that the world is emitting.
01:25 And as long as this figure will not drop to zero, unfortunately, this tendency that we
01:32 are seeing will continue.
01:35 Even in Europe, for instance, between 2021 and 2022, there has been a little decrease
01:42 by 0.8 percent, but it has been still 2.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted by EU27.
01:50 So you're quite clear on what you see as the blame to attribute with climate change
01:56 and global warming.
01:57 But Vincent, when you look at the data, was this a shock?
02:00 Was this something that since 2015 we've had warnings since the Paris Climate Change Summit
02:05 about increasing worries, not sticking to targets?
02:09 Was this out of the blue, this figure, or did you see it coming?
02:12 Well, we see the trend.
02:14 What is a shock is really the 0.32 increase in the record.
02:19 The previous record was not long ago, it was 2019.
02:23 But 0.32 degrees excess is really a surprise.
02:28 It means that actually we are at 1.5 degrees hotter than pre-industrial for a month of
02:34 July.
02:35 So the target that the countries of the world have set for themselves in the Paris agreement.
02:40 So this jump this year is a bit unexpected, also because the El Niño event in the Pacific
02:49 has just started.
02:51 So it's not yet very hot temperatures in the equatorial Pacific.
02:58 And the sea, especially the North Atlantic, has been warming a lot.
03:05 For July, a full half degree hotter than previously.
03:10 And we think that this hot oceanic temperature, much hotter than in the past, is a key driver
03:20 for this record.
03:21 But it's still a surprise, quantitatively, that 0.3 degrees, the record has been broken
03:29 by countries.
03:30 So you saw it coming, but maybe not to this extent this soon.
03:34 Vincent, thank you for talking to us.
03:35 Vincent-Henri Poucq, the Director of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service.
