Totally Cooked: The Climate & Weather Podcast
Sep 10, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min · 11 segments
Professor Peter Stott has spent decades proving that human activity is rapidly warming our climate, and confronting those determined to deny it. In this episode of Totally…
Sarah Perkins-KirkpatrickHost... to, to, you know, to bringing us back to the present day and to... and rather unpleasant, you know, conditions in, um, in France, in Spain, in the highlands of Scotland.
And a- as we mentioned earlier in this, in our little introductory chat, uh, it's Sarah and I here in Australia are the ones used to seeing and kind of thinking about bush fires and, and you know, now it's becoming, it's becoming very common, it seems, for there to be significant heat waves in Western Europe in particular, and, and fires.
And so what's your response been to that, Peter, both kind of from a, a professional perspective, but also from a personal perspective? What...
How do you reconcile what your career has told you is going to happen for many years?
I mean, I wrote my most famous paper, [laughs] you know, the, the highlight of my scientific career was a paper I published in two thousand and four-
... on the two thousand and three European heatwave, and it was the first paper to make a direct link between an extreme weather event and human-induced climate change, and that was the main focus of the, of that study.
One of the things we did slightly incidentally to that was we looked at what would happen in the future in Europe to put it in the context of what had happened in the past and in the present in, in the two thousand and three heatwave.
And we had this, this line on the graph that was extraordinary to... more extraordinary at the time to journalists than it was to me as a scientist, although when I thought about it, I could see how extraordinary it was, of course.
That, you know, the, the, the two thousand and three heatwave, which was so exceptional at that time and caused such damage and was estimated to kill an awful lot of people, tens and...
Anyway, the point was that that, that extreme heat will become, um, first of all, normal with continued emissions, and eventually, that summer would even become a cool summer.
And those graphs that we've plotted at that time from a single climate model back in two thousand and three, four, you know, the trajectory of the, of the actual temperatures has, has, has followed that.
First of all, back in the late nineties, when I started my career in climate science, I thought of these futures as very hypothetical.
... to, to, you know, to bringing us back to the present day and to... and rather unpleasant, you know, conditions in, um, in France, in Spain, in the highlands of Scotland.
And a- as we mentioned earlier in this, in our little introductory chat, uh, it's Sarah and I here in Australia are the ones used to seeing and kind of thinking about bush fires and, and you know, now it's becoming, it's becoming very common, it seems, for there to be significant heat waves in Western Europe in particular, and, and fires.
And so what's your response been to that, Peter, both kind of from a, a professional perspective, but also from a personal perspective? What...
How do you reconcile what your career has told you is going to happen for many years?
I mean, I wrote my most famous paper, [laughs] you know, the, the highlight of my scientific career was a paper I published in two thousand and four-
... on the two thousand and three European heatwave, and it was the first paper to make a direct link between an extreme weather event and human-induced climate change, and that was the main focus of the, of that study.
One of the things we did slightly incidentally to that was we looked at what would happen in the future in Europe to put it in the context of what had happened in the past and in the present in, in the two thousand and three heatwave.
And we had this, this line on the graph that was extraordinary to... more extraordinary at the time to journalists than it was to me as a scientist, although when I thought about it, I could see how extraordinary it was, of course.
That, you know, the, the, the two thousand and three heatwave, which was so exceptional at that time and caused such damage and was estimated to kill an awful lot of people, tens and...
Anyway, the point was that that, that extreme heat will become, um, first of all, normal with continued emissions, and eventually, that summer would even become a cool summer.
And those graphs that we've plotted at that time from a single climate model back in two thousand and three, four, you know, the trajectory of the, of the actual temperatures has, has, has followed that.
First of all, back in the late nineties, when I started my career in climate science, I thought of these futures as very hypothetical.
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