Britain has become wetter and warmer as a result of climate change, with the country’s 10 hottest years in more than a century occurring since 2002, a report by leading meteorologists said on Thursday.
The annual “State of the UK Climate” report, published in the International Journal of Climatology, said 2020 was the fifth wettest and third warmest year on record stretching back to the 19th century.
Last year’s average winter temperature was 5.3C, nearly 1.6C higher than the 1981 to 2010 average. The summer temperature was 0.4 above average at 14.8C, with temperatures hitting 34C for six consecutive days in August 2020. The report said summer temperatures in Britain were likely to hit 40C in the coming years, even if the world meets its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The highest temperature ever recorded in the U.K. is 38.7C, registered in Cambridge in July 2019.
Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said the world was already seeing extreme heat as a result of warming of 1.1 to 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. “We’re likely to see 40C in the UK, although we have never seen those kinds of temperatures (before),” Bentley said. “As we hit 1.5C of global warming, that’s going to not just become something that we see once or twice, it’ll start to become something that we see on a much more regular basis.”