Britain had its hottest summer since records began, provisional Met Office statistics published on Tuesday said, after a season of intense heat and drought that has tested infrastructure, food production and wildfire-fighting capacity.
The agency said Britain had experienced record warmth for the second summer in a row, according to statistics that go back to 1884, as man-made climate change has greatly increased the likelihood of extreme weather.
The country’s five warmest summers have all been recorded since 2003.
On the day meteorological autumn begins in Britain, the Met Office said this summer’s average mean temperature of 16.5 degrees Celsius (61.7 degrees Fahrenheit) was “made around 130 times more likely due to human-induced climate change”.
In a climate free from human-generated greenhouse gases, the UK would experience a summer like 2026 roughly once in 1,000 years, Mark McCarthy, the agency’s head of climate attribution, said.
“In our current climate, which is changing because of the effect of burning of fossil fuels, we should now expect this to be roughly a 1-in-9 year event,” he added in a statement.
SEVERE HEAT IS INCREASINGLY NORMAL
Compared with even hotter temperatures in mainland Europe – where heatwaves have claimed hundreds of lives, disrupted power supplies and shut schools – the consequences in Britain are relatively mild.
A drought has, however, been declared in much of the country and Britain has endured an unprecedented number of wildfires, which in extreme cases destroyed homes.
Heat and drought have also affected farming, with Britain’s cereal harvest on track to be the worst since comparable records began in 1984.
Already in July, the Met Office said extreme weather was increasingly normal.
Even though this summer was on average hotter than previously recorded, the peak temperature of 38.1 C (100.58 F) in London on August 13 this year was only the fifth-hottest day on record for the UK.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin）
