Climate change: UK heatwaves 10 times more likely

Status: 08:21 am| Reading time: 2 minutes

WHeatwaves like the one in mid-July could become more frequent in Great Britain due to climate change, a study suggests. Using computer models, an international team of researchers compared recent temperatures 40 degrees below current climate with a world without a 1.2 degree global temperature increase since the late 19th century.

The result suggests that climate change driven by human-made greenhouse gases makes such an extreme heat wave at least tenfold more likely.

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Armed Forces in Climate Change

21 researchers from Germany, Great Britain and the United States, who came together in the World Meteorological Organization, came to this conclusion, published on Friday. Whether and to what extent extreme weather events are responsible for global warming is called attribution research. On July 19, England recorded over 40 degrees Celsius for the first time. The heat has led to disruptions in local public transport, and hundreds are estimated to have died as a result of the heat.

In Europe and the rest of the world, there are more record-setting heat waves, warming faster than most climate models predict, said Friedrich Otto, a German climate researcher at Imperial College London. “This is a worrying finding that suggests that the impact of climate change on Europe’s already deadly extreme heat will be worse than we previously thought unless we reduce carbon emissions quickly,” Otto said.

higher temperature than the sample

Extreme temperatures in Great Britain are higher than previously modeled, according to scientists. This means that climate change will lead to even more heat waves. In the current climate, temperatures above 40 degrees are still rare in the region. But “almost impossible” without climate change.