Heatwaves, Droughts and Weather Volatility: How Climate Extremes Are Reshaping Central European Energy Markets | Mark Stephens-Row, AtmosphericG2

Mark, thank you. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE So, yes, so first of all, again, thanks to Montel for giving me this opportunity to come and have a chat with you today. Do I need to get us back on track or do I have my 20, 25 minutes? 20 minutes. 20 minutes, okay. You may have to hook me off because I'm talking about something I'm very passionate about as a meteorologist. Just very quickly, I'm going to certainly look back at the summer, as was mentioned. And I like to try to make it educational. I know we've heard El Nino mentioned several times already, so I'm hopefully going to give you a little bit of a heads up on the how and why. A look at climate change, how we actually are forecasting the weather, not for today, tomorrow, next season, but for the next 75 years for the rest of this century, and how that may well impact the markets of Europe. And I'll try and focus it down on Austria. But to be honest, when you get that far in the future, it's difficult to be as precise as that. So my background, I've been a meteorologist my entire professional career. I spent, I was very lucky, I spent a couple of years in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, which I'll touch upon a little bit later in the talk. Got involved in selling weather equipment. But for most of my life, professional life, I've actually worked for an organisation that became the weather company. Weather.com being one of their sort of biggest brands, if you like, working in a sales role. We were acquired by IBM. And when we, in the latter years of that, I actually became a bit more of the local climate risk expert as well. So it's not my background or my professional training, if you like, but I've certainly become something of an expert in that. And now working as client engagement manager with Atmospheric G2. And just now a little tiny five seconds of publicity. So we provide very specific weather intelligence to the energy trading community to improve those risk critical decisions where weather is important. So how can one sum up the summer of 2026? I think one word, wow. Did we expect it to be quite that hot when we were looking at it earlier in the year? Probably not. Certainly all the indicators were that it was going to be a very hot one. So some of my colleagues have put this very helpful graphic together. It's a term that's entered the weather lexicon in the last few years. This heat dome. It used to be talked about in the US quite a lot. But in the last few years here in Europe, we've certainly started talking about it. And really the pattern for the whole of this summer has been this very persistent high pressure. Kind of largely, if you like, sat anomalously over France. Sometimes drifting a little bit further east. Sometimes north. Sometimes a little southwest. But it's really been Western and Central Europe that has seen the most anomalous heat, as we'll see in, again, a bit more detail. You'll see that parts of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe are still slightly tinged yellow. But you don't have to go too far away. And you're actually into blue. And Finland, for example, last year they had a completely record-breaking summer. Many, many days above 30. This year the summer's been pretty awful. I don't know if there's anybody from that side of the Nordic. Indeed. Absolutely. So I'm glad to hear that. I bet that's backed up. Even down here, actually, in the Balkans, again, whilst it has been slightly warmer than normal. And if you're on holiday there, I'm sure you didn't really notice. Oh, my goodness. It's 32 instead of 35. Ah, never mind. But it has actually been slightly cooler than normal down there as well. And, of course, all the rain-bearing systems have tended to be shunted well up to the north. And that, to be honest, I think the drought is perhaps an even bigger story in terms of its extent and longevity. I must apologise to the Austrians for bringing this very British-looking rain with me. But I'm sure you're probably quite pleased about that, as it will, over time, as we'll see in a moment, hopefully start to improve things as we go forward in time. So, as I said, I think that's probably, certainly for central Europe, been at least as big of a story as the temperatures. Yes, I know we've seen records. We've seen the hottest ever, et cetera. But that drought has really been very, very persistent and led to incredible pictures of the Danube. I think you could practically walk across it in places. And, obviously, it's affected the river traffic. Most of the major river arteries of Europe have had big problems. Even the UK, where I'm from, as you can see, we also have been largely in that brown category. And we're under a drought limitation now in the UK and probably will be for quite some months, even though it is now raining there as well. And many of the rivers, as you can see throughout Europe, were in that red category, critically low levels. But if you were down in parts of Spain, even in Italy, as you can see, and Turkey's the other place, actually. Again, talking to some of our customers in Turkey. Central Turkey, in particular, has actually had relatively, for their summer, quite a lot of rain to keep their hydro reserves up. And the far north of Scandinavia, again, as well. It's really just been the southern Nordic part that has actually also seen that drought. The heat waves aren't new, though. In the weather training sessions that I've been given over the last sort of 20 years or so, I kept this weather map because, basically, it was showing at that time, this is from early August of 2003. So now 23 years ago, the temperature that day, just around the sort of Spanish-Portuguese border, just nudged up to around 48. So, actually, that's higher than anything we've had this entire summer. So, although on average, it has been a record-breaking summer for consistent warmth, we've not actually exceeded the highest sort of ever temperatures. I believe somewhere in Sicily still holds the absolute record, pretty much around 49 Celsius. So, we haven't got that close to that record this year. However, if I were a betting man, and I'm not, maybe next year, exceeding 50 degrees, I think you might be worthwhile looking up what the odds on that might be. So, these heat domes are absolutely becoming more frequent. The number of hot days is incredible. I mean, here in Vienna, for example, between 45 and 48 days, I think it depends on which weather station you look at, where the temperature reached or exceeded 30 degrees. And even the UK, 40 degrees out of three months of summer, where somewhere in the UK the temperature hit 30 or above. Still didn't break, I have to say, our lovely record from 1976 in the UK, which I think was actually 14 days above 32. So, we still haven't actually broken that one. I slipped this slide in actually this morning, because the BBC actually published this, and I want to highlight Copernicus and the fantastic work that scientists in Europe are continuing to do in the field of climate science. Unfortunately, our colleagues across the other side of the Atlantic have had a lot of their funding taken away, and in some cases, their jobs. And it's become really quite a struggle to maintain some of the climate science work that they're doing over there. But Copernicus, which is funded by everybody in this room, is doing fantastic work using satellite technology to monitor what's happening around the planet, so not just Europe. But just focusing on Europe again, the hottest ever. We've seen many places well above two, and again, parts of central France above four Celsius throughout the entire summer as a temperature anomaly. And if you go back in the bottom graph there to 1980, you can see a fairly steady progression. Big blip here, 2003. That was still the standout summer. But we have now exceeded it. And not just by a little bit, but actually, again, over half a degree Celsius warmer, which in terms of records is really a big jump that you could make over the whole summer. And of course, if you've had a very warm summer, then what does that foretell for the winter, autumn to come? It's not just been the surface temperatures, of course. It's the sea temperatures. And again, one of my colleagues put these graphs together a few days ago on some of the blogs that we push out. And this shows the Mediterranean. And I'm sure there's people in this room, I suspect, who had some lovely holidays down to the Mediterranean through this summer. At one point, a few weeks ago, the temperature actually off southern France, sea surface temperature hit 32 degrees Celsius, which again is just like off the scale in terms of anomaly. It's the sort of temperature you find in the Red Sea. Slightly interestingly, you are seeing still warm, but not as warm anomalies through the Aegean and the far eastern part of the Mediterranean. But the reality is, is that the Med is really cooking. And it takes a lot to shift that. Water does not cool down quickly like the atmosphere does. So there's certainly an implication just from that, that the conditions of the weather, if you like, around the Mediterranean countries, and I know that doesn't include Austria, but I would certainly think that, you know, the southern alpine areas up here are near enough that they could see some of the effects of this. We may well see something in terms of a lot of rainfall, increased storminess. As we go into the autumn, it will cool down, particularly in the north. Maybe not as much as it should do, but it will certainly cool down. And as you move that cooler air down into the hot Mediterranean region, it destabilises and creates some really quite impressive storms. So it would not surprise me that rainfall levels around all of the Mediterranean countries through this autumn really do start to perk up. I'm not promising something called a medicaine. I don't know if anybody's heard about that, but in the last few years, that sort of weather, the sea surface temperatures are high enough now, above 27 degrees, to sustain tropical storms. Now, the Mediterranean basin is not known for tropical storms, but in the last couple of years, we've had a few features that have really attained that kind of status. So again, we're going to have to watch out for that as we go through the next couple of months. Hopefully, the water will cool down enough to take that threat away, but it's definitely going to be there going through the autumn. Now, as meteorologists, we love our oscillations. Any traders in the room here, I'm sure I've heard of a few of those that are mentioned there. I will talk about the El Nino, as I mentioned, which is part of an oscillation called ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation. The NAO, the North Atlantic Oscillation, is a measure of describing how active or not the jet stream is in the Atlantic. And there are lots of other ones that interact with each other. Interestingly, one we might need to keep an eye on, right down the bottom, the Indian Ocean dipole. And that sounds like, it's an awful long way away from Europe. But the reality, actually, is that what happens, it's a bit like El Nino, but in the Indian Ocean. And of course, if things happen at the same time as each other, so if one is extremely warm and so is another one, those waves can basically amplify, and there is a possibility that that might impact the weather. But El Nino has really been the story. Way back in April, UK Metalfice, they were already suggesting the likelihood of a very strong El Nino. And you'll notice that the text gets bigger. The words get more scary and frightening. I mean, I've seen Godzilla El Nino being talked about. But, excuse me, I mean, at the end of the day, there is no doubt that this El Nino is likely to be probably the most, the strongest that we've ever seen in the scientific era. I think it was one of the headlines, I think, from The Guardian, I guess over here, strongest in a thousand years. I mean, difficult to know. We didn't have much satellite measurement a thousand years ago. But, you know, you can draw some conclusions from the impacts of El Nino, which we'll look at in a moment. And there is no doubt, from a measurement perspective, I mean, the Pacific is plastered with this stuff now. There are buoys out there measuring it at every level in the atmosphere. So, you have a little bit of education. And so, the El Nino, that's the warm phase. La Nina, the cold phase. So, it's the El Nino that we're going into now. And essentially what happens is that you see a bit of a reversal of the flow through the tropical Pacific. The winds actually should normally be kind of doing this, going against the turn of the world, which feels a bit weird, but that's just the way the weather systems work. But during the El Nino, you've now got stronger, anomalously westerly winds blowing onto this coast of North and South America, pushing warm water up against that coast. And because it's pushing that water against the coast, it literally actually pulls water with it, if you like. And it basically creates this growing pond of anomalously warm water. And the La Nina is the opposite. The thing about this El Nino as well is not just the size of it, it's just the rapidity with which it's come upon us. Normally, you have a La Nina, which we had earlier on in the year. You go into a nice sort of level kind of platform for a little bit, sits around the normal, if you like, or the zero level, and then it will transition. This year, no, it went vroom, straight from pretty much La Nina into El Nino in a very rapid fashion. The graph we, well, the map we probably need to focus on to get these three. What is the effect around the world? And I think the thing that stands out immediately, hopefully anybody in this room will notice, there's nothing over Europe. And despite all of the headlines, despite the fact that we as meteorologists and climatologists still talk about it, actually, El Nino and Europe, in terms of weather, it's a little bit difficult to say precisely. Now, if you're in Australia, you're in Japan, you're in California, you're in Peru, you're basically, it's a surefire bet. You're going to get wet, you're going to get cold, you're going to get dry, you're going to get warm, et cetera. So that will actually show you where we expect the conditions to be. But if we home in on Europe, again, this is some work that some of my meteorologists did a couple of weeks ago. And this middle graph here is effectively the autumn period, if you like, correlated with El Nino. And in fact, there's a slightly more correlation there. But if you're looking at the winter, there is literally nothing. So even if you pass out some of the smaller El Ninos, there isn't a very definitive signal in terms of an aggregate over three months. So we need to start getting a little bit cleverer and look in more detail at individual months. And there, there was a bit more of a signal which I'll talk about. So El Nino, La Nina, what is climate change bringing over the next few decades? I love this graph. I mean, many of you in the room of a certain age may remember a lot of noise being made, getting on for 20, no, 30 years ago now, a former US presidential candidate and his hockey stick. And here it is, you know, whether it's the temperature or the carbon dioxide levels. What we're looking at here is the last 2,000 years. So we're starting zero over here through to the present day. Carbon dioxide levels at the top, reality, I will accept. We've really only been measuring it since about here, you know, in terms of there are instruments actually making measurements around the planet. When I was born, global levels were around 320 parts per million, and now we're at 427. And the scary fact I'll share with you now is that worst case scenarios under the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say that that number could be 1,200 by 2,100. So business as usual, we could be looking still at a tripling of that. And we've already got, well, it says 1.3. Now this is aggregated over a long period of time. And already in the last few years, we've clearly exceeded 1.5. And I just showed for, you know, we're 1.65, excuse me, for the summer this year. So you have to be that warm for a longer period to say that you've lost that particular goal. But most climate scientists, I'm afraid, already saying the 1.5 is a goner. There is too much momentum around the rising global temperature now for us to be able to say that we are going to keep it below 1.5. And they think the two-degree goal is looking shaky if we really don't get our foot off the gas, literally, as soon as possible. I will talk about this again in a bit more detail. So you've got CO2 levels, you've got the temperature. And interestingly, I mean, this tells a fantastic story, I think, of mankind. I mean, we haven't, this is only the last 2,000 years. If you went back another sort of 8,000 to 10,000 that way, you'd be into an ice age. And it only takes the temperature fall across the planet of around sort of 4 or 5 Celsius to tip the planet into an ice age. We're looking possibly by the end of this century at 4 or 5 the other way. So putting that into perspective, moving from an ice age of those low temperatures and we're going to do the opposite, possibly in a century or less, again, puts it in perspective. And the thing that it does also show is that the sea level is rising quite dramatically as well. And that has some quite serious implications. I won't go through all of these eruptions, but whenever people talk to me about climate change, what about the volcanoes? You know, I mean, surely they have a much bigger impact than anything that we do. No. You know, we are currently somewhere between 37 and 38. This is the equivalent of CO2, so it's not just carbon dioxide, but it's like the other stuff that's up there. Gigatons per year. Volcanic emissions globally. Way lower than that. And individual eruptions you can see there, again, have very little impact on the climate. The biggest one in the last sort of 500 years, this Laki, is actually Iceland. So I won't try and pronounce it. I apologise if there's any Icelanders in the room, because I've never been able to pronounce the I know, no, I can't do it, I can't do it, which one it was. But Laki, I mean, whoa, Laki went on for years. Some historians put the French Revolution, you know, they blame the French Revolution because it changed the weather in Europe so much that it actually dropped global temperatures by over a degree. But the thing is, it then went back up again because it's short-lived. The impact is very short-lived. What we're doing is going to stay for decades and centuries to come if we don't actually stop putting all of the various different gases in the atmosphere. In the interest of time, again, I won't focus too much on this. I think most people in the room, you know, weather forecasting, we are typically looking at only a few days, maybe seasonally sometimes. But climate risk data, really they are still running a weather model but just letting it run, not for 14 days like the ECMWF or the GFS models that some of the traders would use for predictions today, but literally letting them run for like 50 years. And in the background, changing the amount of CO2 that you've got to actually sort of like, you know, see what might happen. And the Met Office actually produced a mock-up. They were obviously off the back of the incredible summer weather we've had in the UK they produced a mock-up of a weather forecast for 2050. And their models suggest that by 2050 there is a significantly, you know, above 50% chance that we would see temperatures in the UK of 45. The record now is 40.4. And that could come as part of a nine-day heat wave above 40 degrees. And that's the UK. 38 in Scotland. Is there anybody in Scotland? Probably not. But I mean, they go, whoa. And that's what the models are saying. So it really is, you know, it really is as bad, if you like, as the climate scientists are saying. I mean, this is the position right now. Global average temperature, highest ever. And like every day, we're just breaking a record. Oh, today was the highest ever. And then tomorrow is the highest ever. It's no doubt that the El Nino is starting to contribute to that. But it hasn't peaked yet. We've still got probably another two to three months. So it's very likely that red line will stay to the right all the way through the rest of this year and enter stage left 2027 at the highest level, above the level that you can see there as well. Once El Nino goes away, yes, it should. Slightly cooled down again. But basically, we're just kind of just going up and up in these little leaps. And Europe literally is warming up faster than anywhere on the planet. And as you can see there, it's kind of eastern Europe and central Europe. Interestingly enough, much further east than obviously this summer. These anomalies were much more over here. But if you look over the trend of temperature rise over the last decade or so, or few decades, then it's warming the most there. Now, who in the room can spot the cold blob? And that's the one that keeping climate scientists awake at night at the moment because it's the only place on the planet that's cooling down. And it really, it really is. All the measurements and everything else that we're seeing there is showing that there's this large area in the North Atlantic that is cooling down. And this is possibly why. Hopefully, a few in the room have heard of the AMOC, the Atlantic Meriodinal Overturning Circulation. So there is certainly a significant possibility. One German scientist just very recently said he felt now it was more likely the odds, if you like, were better to put a gun to your head playing Russian roulette. So basically, one in six or more by 2100 that this current in the Atlantic that keeps Norway, the Nordic region, it keeps the UK, it keeps much of France and Northern Europe much warmer than it should do in the winter could well break down quite significantly. So instead of getting extreme heat all the way through the winter, we end up with very cold winters but blisteringly hot summers and very stormy weather in between. Again, there are lots of these other tipping points that we may well have reached and I hope I'm not depressing the audience too much but I will leave you on a positive note, I promise. It's going to be hard, I know, but I'm going to try. So with the major European impacts, you know, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the sea level rise projections. So again, the worst case sort of scenarios at the moment are suggesting 60 centimetres. So that much more sea level generally around most of the European coasts. Notice though, far north of Scandinavia there in the Baltic Sea, it's actually gone the other way. So actually, it's going down and you've got the same impact again around the Greenland coast. Anybody know what that might be? Any geographers in the room? I'm never going to volunteer an answer. Isostatic readjustment. So literally, the last ice age squashed so much of the landmass of the northern hemisphere down and still, 12,000 or so years later, Scandinavia is still lifting up. There are some parts of Lapland that we think are about 300 metres higher up now than they were when they were crushed under the ice. And the same is true of Greenland. If all the ice disappeared off Greenland, it would pop up like a little sort of sponge thing. Incidentally, it's about 1,000 years even in the worst case to melt Greenland. But if it did, that's something like 7 metres, not 60 centimetres on top of the sea level. Think of all of the ports. Yes, yep, sure. Very quickly, yes, yeah. There's obviously major consumers of energy out there that are going to be impacted by climate change as well. And I think the farming area was one that I would focus on. So gas supplies are used to make fertiliser, as an example. And that's certainly an industry that's going to be significantly impacted. So, the good news. We can fix it. Yes, we can. I clearly haven't got time to go through all of this. But there are things that we can do and are doing. We need to do them faster. There's no two ways about that. We need to stop cutting down trees. We need to plant more trees. We do need to cut down on eating meat, et cetera, et cetera. And electrification, which I've heard today, brilliant, fantastic. Let's just do it faster than we already are. And a positive note I'll leave you. I said to you I was in Antarctica and I was part of the team that discovered the Antarctic ozone hole in the early 1980s. And the scientists at the time, there was lots of disagreement, but they then realised that the Antarctic ozone hole had been created by CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons. So what they did is they banned them. The Montreal Protocol, 1997, that was it, gone. No more CFCs. And now the ozone hole, 40 years on, it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And lastly, yes, rain is coming for Europe. So this is the outlook from AG2 for the winter, well, sorry, for the early winter for Q4. We definitely think there's going to be more rain and that's a good thing. Hopefully not too much rain. Climate whiplash is another possibility. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mark. Even you had some doom pictures along the way. You ended on a positive note. So that's very good. Thank you. We see the drought periods coming often, more often than before. We had one in 22, we had one in 24, now we had one in 26. When's the next one? I wouldn't be at all surprised. I wouldn't say next year, but I would think the year after. It's quite possible. One of the things is the climate whiplash is a real thing. Scientists are showing that we are seesawing as the planet tries to balance itself. We're going to see more and more of these attempts and they've become more and more extreme to balance out because it's out of kilter. So it's quite likely that within the next two years we'll get another one. Yeah. On that, we have to close. Yeah, sure. I'll be at lunch if anybody wants to. So we can address Mark during the lunchtime and here's a small present from us. Thank you very much. Thank you. So we are a little bit behind schedule but still we are within