European Union scientists confirm last year was the hottest on record. We hear from the European Copernicus climate service and from the Los Angeles firefighter battling flames and exhaustion. Also on the programme: Venezuela's authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro is about to be sworn in for a third term in office; and one of the world's greatest violins is about to be auctioned. (Photo: A man uses a bag on his head to protect himself form the sun during the heatwave in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 22 April 2024. Credit: EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
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Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in London.
I'm Tim Franks.
We're beginning with a clash between hard data and metaphor.
The hard data is new evidence that the world is hotter than it's ever been, or at least since records began.
2024 was the first year that global temperatures were 1.6 degrees above the pre industrial average.
Remember, they're back.
Back in 2015, the world's nations all agreed that we needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.
That's the hard data.
The battle with language that I mentioned that comes with a quote today from the European Union climate monitoring body Copernicus, which was the first to come out with the most recent figures.
And the director of the Copernicus Agency is Carlo Buontempo, who in his words says that he's run out of metaphors.
To explain the warming of we're seeing over the last few years, I tried different way of telling the story.
The story is the data.
But when we communicate, we try to add some explanation.
And in that sense, I really thought of what could be yet another metaphor.
We can use another image.
And I decided that we use them all.
I think what is important is really that the data speaks for itself.
And something that happened today which I think is important is that all the main climate center worldwide have all pushed out their own calculation and they're basically all saying the same thing.