People watch the sunset from Greenwhich Park as the U.K. deals with its third heatwave of the year in London on Saturday.Kevin Coombs/Reuters
British summers have long been known for wet weather and relatively cool temperatures. This summer, however, has seen searing heat, hundreds of wildfires and widespread drought that climatologists say is rapidly becoming the norm.
On Monday, the country’s weather service, the Met Office, released its annual State of the U.K. Climate report, which concluded that Britain has become warmer in the past decade and experienced far more record-breaking extreme weather.
This year already had the warmest and driest spring on record, and this past June was the hottest in England since the Met Office began keeping track in 1884.
While the U.K. did not experience the kind of baking heat that recently swept across southern Europe, the temperature did climb to 35.8 C in Faversham, Kent, on July 1 and there have been 10 days of 30-plus-degree weather so far this summer. Scotland hit 32 degrees this month for the seventh time since 1961.
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Last month, the Environment Agency declared a drought for much of northern England and several water utilities have told residents not to water lawns or wash cars. Firefighters have been called out to a record 650 wildfires across the U.K.
“We need to be prepared for more summer droughts as our climate changes,” Helen Wakeham, an Environment Agency official who chairs the country’s National Drought Group, said in a news release.
The last three years have been in the U.K.’s top-five warmest on record, Monday’s climate report said. The overall temperature has increased at a rate of 0.25 degrees per decade since the eighties, and the most recent decade – 2015 to 2024 – was 1.24 degrees warmer than the period from 1961 to 1990 (which is used by the World Meteorological Organization for historical comparison and climate modelling). The number of days where temperatures have been 10 degrees above the average of that 30-year period have also quadrupled.
The recent warming trend is even more pronounced when compared with the Met’s Central England Temperature data, the world’s longest continuous temperature record, dating back to 1659. A Met analysis shows that “recent warming has far exceeded any observed temperatures in at least 300 years,” the report said.
These changes are not a natural variation, said Mike Kendon, a Met climate scientist and the report’s lead author, in a news release. He added that numerous studies have shown how greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere and changing weather.
Spectators cool down at Wimbledon in London on July 1. This past June was the hottest in England since the Met Office began keeping track in 1884.Toby Melville/Reuters
The increasing number of heat waves has prompted a debate about the country’s lack of preparedness for hot weather and other extreme weather events.
Like many European countries, air conditioning is a rarity in the U.K. and buildings are ill-equipped to handle rising temperatures because of their age. The U.K. Climate Change Committee, a government advisory body, said in a recent report that the number of heat-related deaths could more than triple to 10,000 a year by 2050 because of climate change and the aging population.
On Monday, Julia King, a member of the House of Lords who chairs the committee’s work on adaption, said the U.K. should learn from countries in southern Europe and adopt measures to cope with extreme heat. “This isn’t going away,” she told the BBC’s Today program. “This isn’t just: ‘Oh, we’re having a lovely summer.’”
“We are trying to persuade the government that we should have a heat strategy. Because heat affects everything.”
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Monday that the “science is unequivocal” and that “rising temperatures place pressures on every aspect of our daily lives.”
He added that the country can make a difference in addressing climate change and outlined measures the government is taking to meet its target of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. Those plans include a £700-million program, or $1.29-billion, to encourage people to buy electric vehicles and phase out gas-powered cars by 2030.
“The only answer is to reduce emissions, protect and restore nature, and adapt to the impacts that are now inevitable,” Mr. Miliband said.