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A red warning for extreme heat was issued for various parts of the UK this week, including London<\/p>\n
Brook Mitchell\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019m finding the heatwave<\/a> hitting Europe really scary. It\u2019s bad enough in itself, with many records being broken, especially for the higher nighttime temperatures that make it so much harder to cope. But I just keep thinking, \u201cIf it\u2019s like this now, what\u2019s it going to be like in 10, 20 or 30 years\u2019 time?\u201d<\/p>\n The answer, of course, is hotter and hotter and hotter<\/a>. In the UK, national weather service the Met Office has just warned that, by 2056, there could be nine days in a row with temperatures above 40\u00b0C (104<\/a>\u00b0<\/a>F)<\/a>, with some places hitting 45\u00b0C (113\u00b0F). In just 30 years! I\u2019ve seen at least one piece asking \u201cis this the new normal?\u201d about the current heatwave, but we\u2019re never going to have normal in our lifetimes again \u2013 just ever more extreme heat.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible to get through even worse heatwaves than this if all your infrastructure and systems are geared up to cope. But the UK is very much not prepared. The air conditioning in New Scientist\u2019s office, for instance, is failing to keep up with the heat as I write \u2013 and lots of people have to endure this hot weather without any air conditioning at all. In a sign of the times, a meeting on adapting to extreme heat \u2013 part of London Climate Action Week \u2013 got cancelled because of extreme heat<\/a>.<\/p>\n Climate scientists are continually warning of the need to prepare for hotter heatwaves, worse droughts, more flooding and rising seas. During heatwaves like this one, they might even get a little media coverage. But then the weather cools, the news agenda moves on and nothing is ever done.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not just my view \u2013 it\u2019s the official verdict<\/a> of the UK\u2019s Climate Change Committee, which advises the UK government. \u201cAdaptation progress is either too slow, has stalled, or is heading in the wrong direction,\u201d it said in a report<\/a> last year. Everyone seems to assume this green and pleasant land is going to remain green and pleasant, but it won\u2019t. We\u2019re heading towards catastrophe, but never looking up.<\/p>\n There are many aspects of this that frighten me. Firstly, emissions are still rising, so the fundamental cause of the problem is getting worse. True, it\u2019s not getting worse as fast as it was, but we are currently on course for average global surface temperatures to rise by between 2.1<\/a>\u00b0C<\/a> and 3.3\u00b0C by 2100<\/a>, and possibly even more<\/a>.<\/p>\n Even these alarming numbers are a little misleading because the oceans that cover most of the planet don\u2019t warm as fast as the land. Average land temperatures are therefore going to go up by a lot more than the above numbers imply.<\/p>\n And what really matters to us is extreme weather, not the average. The projections for future extremes are already dire, and there are reasons to think that we\u2019re in for extremes even greater than those currently projected for a given level of warming. For starters, heatwaves are already more extreme than projected in some parts of the world<\/a>. One reason for this is that climate models may not be capturing how the dynamics of the jet streams change<\/a> in a warmer world. Another is that regional models haven\u2019t accounted for reductions in sunlight-blocking air pollution<\/a>.<\/p>\n The next level beyond is how bad the knock-on effects of this extreme weather will be. These kinds of things are very difficult to project because so many complex systems are involved, but here, too, there is reason to think we are underestimating the impacts.<\/p>\n For starters, we could see mass deaths even among young people<\/a> as heatwaves get more extreme. Then there\u2019s our ability to feed people, the basis of civilisation. There\u2019s growing evidence that global warming is already hitting food production<\/a>, pushing up prices<\/a> and causing yet more deforestation as farmers try to compensate.<\/p>\n As ever more weather extremes hit the world at the same time, the economic impacts are going to get ever more serious, too. One 2024 study warned that the result could be the worst global financial crisis ever<\/a>.<\/p>\n And I haven\u2019t even mentioned the wild cards, such as the Amazon drying up or the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation shutting down<\/a>. One researcher I chatted with at a recent conference thinks a slowdown of this crucial current system around 12,000 years ago triggered extreme seasonality in places like Britain, with sweltering summers, but temperatures plummeting tens of degrees below freezing in winter.<\/p>\n The fact is, the world is changing fast and we need to change just about every aspect of our lives to adapt \u2013 our homes and offices, factories and schools, cars and trains, farms and gardens, and so on. But it\u2019s not happening.\u00a0 That\u2019s why if you\u2019re not scared witless by this heatwave, you should be.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n climate change<\/a>\/extreme weather<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A red warning for extreme heat was issued for various parts of the UK this week, including London…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[556,1397,5099,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-659321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-extreme-weather","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}