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COSTING THE EARTH
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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Costing the Earth tells stories which touch all our lives, looking at man's effect on the environment and at how the environment reacts. It questions accepted truths, challenges the people in charge and reports on progress towards improving the world we live in. |
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LISTEN AGAIN Ìý30 min |
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PRESENTER |
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'I really enjoy working on Costing the Earth, because it has the time to get its teeth into a subject and the resources to look at it critically. I hope it manages to say something new about most of the subjects it covers.'
Alex Kirby
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PROGRAMME DETAILS |
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| The devastation suffered by the village of Boscastle can still be widely seen |
After the Flood
ÌýÌýÌý
Monday 16 August 2004 is a date few people in the picturesque North Cornish village of Boscastle are ever likely to forget.
The forecast for August the 16th promised heavy showers.Ìý Trips to the beach were postponed, keen walkers packed their anoraks.Ìý But no-one in the area was prepared for what was to come.Ìý By two o’clock in the afternoon the Rivers Jordan and Valency had merged into a speeding wall of water, parked cars were being deposited in Boscastle harbour and children were being plucked by helicopter from rooftops.
‘Costing the Earth’ tonight revisits Boscastle four months after Britain’s most spectacular rainstorm in living memory.Ìý Alex Kirby meets some of the heroes of that day and brings a battery of meteorologists and climate scientists to the town to discuss the lessons we might learn from this astonishing display of the destructive power of weather.
Meanwhile across Europe in 2003 the hottest summer in centuries was raging. It was a heatwave that killed somewhere in the region of 30,000 people. It was perhaps the first time, according to climatologist Peter Stott of the Met Office, that a sever weather event could be attributed to climate change and a possible shape of things to come.
Climate change seems certain to bring many more extreme weather events to Britain’s shores.Ìý Boscastle could prove to be the first in a long line of natural disasters.ÌýÌý So are we ready?Ìý Will our weather forecasters be able to give us the warning we need?Ìý Are we building homes and communities strong enough to withstand the worst that Britain’s new weather patterns might throw at us?
Alex Kirby and his panel of experts search for the answers in ‘Costing the Earth’ from Boscastle at nine o’clock tonight.
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