Are we all toast? The UK’s prospects in the climate crisis

You may have noticed that in the past years the summer temperatures have been on the rise. This past summer, as heat waves ravaged western Europe, the UK recorded its first ever temperature above 40 degrees Celsius. And as scientists and the public run around claiming climate change, the skeptic’s natural question is, was this actually caused by climate change — or was this just an annual fluctuation in the weather? 

To answer the skeptic, it was climate change. According to a 2020 paper in Nature, the natural likelihood of such heat events is practically zero, specifically once every 100 years at best. And Europe has been teetering on the edge of that 40 degree mark during all of the past summers.

Extreme heat events are a significant issue to both the government and the population. Increased extreme heat causes water to evaporate faster, resulting in droughts. In past years we have already had to impose water usage caps due to these droughts, leading to many disappointed children as the neighborhood pool dries up; or disappointed grandparents as their home gardens turn into deserts simply because there is not enough water to keep them alive. 

A related issue that arises due to such droughts is a lack of productivity in key industries. We cannot water our crops, and workers cannot work in the extreme temperatures due to risk of heat stroke. During the 2019 UK summer heat waves resulted in almost a thousand excess deaths above the baseline, paired with a decline in agricultural and economic productivity.

The 2020 study published in Nature looked at the probability of extreme heat occurrences at a 1km x 1km scale over the entirety of the United Kingdom. The group examined 16 of the most advanced climate models under three different scenarios:

1. 1. A hypothetical, purely natural environment with no manmade climate influence.
   2. An environment with the same climate forcings as has been observed between 1960 and 2019.
   3. An environment influenced by continually increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Their first significant result was that under the hypothetical, purely natural environment with purely internal climate variability, extreme temperature events are practically impossible. This implies that the heatwaves observed in the previous summers have been very unlikely, which other attribution studies have identified to be as a result of climate change.

More importantly, the study found that the Southeast of the UK is the most prone to extreme heat events, likely due to the low-lying country and density of the London metropolitan area. The Southwest is, of course, also prone to these events; however less so. Additionally, the further North you go, the less likely such events will be. Some parts of Scotland were even predicted to experience cooling effects. Despite the cooling predicted for Scotland, when averaged over the entirety of the country, the return time of above 40 degrees Celsius events were found to have decreased from once in a 100 years, to once in 3.5 years.

So, without curbing greenhouse gas emissions, summer days exceeding 40 degrees celsius will be almost 30 times more common than at present. Hopefully these results are taken into account by government officials, especially by those in charge of matters concerning the Southeast. If not, we may have to look to Scotland for an escape from the hell that is developing in the South.

Author: Eetu Heikkilä

Christidis, Nikolaos, et al. “The Increasing Likelihood of Temperatures above 30 to 40 °C in the United Kingdom.” Nature Communications, vol. 11, no. 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16834-0. 

“Heatwave Mortality Monitoring, Summer 2019.” GOV.UK. Public Health England, Nov. 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/942646/PHE_heatwave_report_2019.pdf.