40C Summers in UK 'a Sign of Things to Come', Warns Met Office

Summary:

• A UNICEF report warns that half of young people in Europe and Central Asia are exposed to severe heat waves.
• The Met Office predicts that the UK's record-breaking heat will be the norm by 2060 due to climate change.
• Extreme temperatures in the UK are increasing faster than the global average, leading to more high-temperature records being broken.
• Children are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, leading to potential inequalities in education and health.
• Global efforts to cut emissions need to be accelerated to limit future climate change impacts.

A report by the UN Children's Agency UNICEF has warned that half of all young people in Europe and Central Asia are now regularly exposed to severe heat waves. It says their health is increasingly at risk from such climate change-related extreme weather. It comes as the Met Office says that the record-breaking heat experienced in the UK last year will be the norm by 2060.

Last summer's searing heat waves sparked wildfires across the UK with more than 800 on the hottest day in July when temperatures broke through 40 Celsius for the first time. These blistering conditions also had significant impacts on human health, with thousands more deaths in the over 65s than usual in England and Wales across July and August. But this new Met Office report shows that the persistent heat wasn't confined to summer, with every month apart from December warmer than the long-term average. This saw 2022 become the UK's warmest year in records dating back to 1884. Driving all this according to the researchers are ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities. If these stay constant, an exceptional year like 2022 will become the norm for the UK. Year like 2022, the warmest year on record for the UK in our current climate, will be roughly an average year by the middle of the century, just after mid-century by 2060. By 2100, nine out of ten years will actually be warmer than 2022. Researchers say that in the UK, temperature extremes are increasing much faster than the average. This will likely see far more high temperature records broken in the years to come, potentially by quite wide margins. Scientists say that this pattern is now being seen all over the world, including the dramatic heat that's driving wildfires in Greece and many other locations right now. But even though these higher temperatures will become increasingly likely in a warmer world, the UK still has much further to go to properly prepare for this new normal. Government advisers say that the UK is still not treating adapting to climate change as a national priority.

It's never too late. We have to remember that every positive action we take, every tonne of carbon we leave in the ground is limiting future harms and is creating a safer future for everybody. But it is truly heartbreaking to see the impacts unfold over the last few months, you know, all across the Northern Hemisphere. It's almost a pattern here in Australia. We watch these unfold over these months and we think, what is our sun we're going to bring? It's a period of a lot of anxiety and a lot of very genuine human suffering that we see. This is the age of consequences for our past inaction on climate change. Because we bait more of these impacts into the system. We do have to double down on our efforts to adapt to what's coming. But, you know, I say again, the core message from all this is that it's so essential. We cut global emissions in half this decade and countries like Australia and the UK need to go a lot faster than that. Because that's going to be so consequential when it comes to the severity of impacts that we'd be facing further down the line. Do you feel that we're going in the right direction? Not fast enough. I mean, look, a lot has changed in the last few years. We've had most of the world's major economies take more steps. We're seeing, you know, a race among some of the big countries now to really own the clean economy of the future. Because that's where the smart money is. That's where the new opportunities are. But when you look at the science, when you look at the pace at which these impacts are unfolding, nothing we're doing is yet fast enough. So it's really going to take all of us to get our emissions plummeting over the coming decades. But, you know, the hate, sorry, it's so important. It's so worth it. And the price from that is better security, better safety, better prosperity. There's everything for the taking, but we really have absolutely no more time to lose.