From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby/Robin Guenier/Paul Kolk/Ian Magness

The record-breaking UK heat experienced in 2022 will be regarded as a cool year by the end of this century, the Met Office says.

Its report shows that last year was “extraordinary”, with a heatwave pushing the UK record over 40C for the first time.

Hot years like 2022 will be the average by 2060, if carbon emissions are as expected, the authors say.

By 2100, it would be a cooler-than-average year across the UK.

Climate change is having an increasing impact on all parts of the UK, playing a key role in pushing last year’s temperatures to record highs.

While rain might be the dominant factor in the current UK climate, just a year ago the UK was suffering from a powerful heatwave that helped make 2022 the warmest year in records dating back to 1884, and also broke the Central England temperature series that goes back to 1659.

The UK’s highest daily temperature last year was 40.3C, recorded at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, which beat the previous high mark by a large margin.

As well as persistent warmth, one key aspect of the study shows that extreme temperatures in the UK are changing much faster than the average.

“The actual extremes that we’re seeing, the highest, the hottest days, those are really increasing markedly too,” said lead author Mike Kendon.

“We’re going to see very, very many more days, exceeding 30, 32 or 35C. So warmer summers will become very much more frequent, and hot days will become very much more frequent.”

One of the elements that might have led to a very hot year in 2022 and may help explain the current wetter summer are changes in the jet stream, the fast moving winds that carry weather systems across the Atlantic to the UK.

In recent years the jet stream has shown a tendency to get stuck, meaning that weather patterns can persist or become “blocked” in place for weeks. There is a school of thought that a warming climate is causing this change.

“I think the jury is out, but there is definitely some science showing that we are getting these much more persistent, static kind of weather patterns, similar to what we’ve got at the moment with the heat waves,” said Prof Liz Bentley, from the Royal Meteorological Society.

“It’ll be interesting to see if there’s conclusive evidence that climate change has led to that. And that’s going to be a pattern that we see going forward in future.”

The authors of the Met Office study say that 2022’s record year for the UK was made much more likely by climate change.

“The heatwave that is happening now across southern Europe, the heatwave that we saw last year, all of these things are fitting into a pattern,” said Mr Kendon.

“These things emphasise that our climate is changing. And it’s changing now, and it’s changing fast.”

Looking forward, under a medium emissions scenario, there’s a 1 in 15 chance that the UK would hit 40C in any one year by the end of the century.

“That trend for (extreme temperatures) is going to increase as we go through this century,” said Prof Liz Bentley.

“If you look at future climate projections, we are on a path for hotter, drier summers. So 2022, for me was very much a sign of things to come in future years with our changing climate.”

The ten year period from 2013 to 2022 is the warmest ten-year period on record.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66304220

The ten year period from 2013 to 2022 is the warmest ten-year period on record.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66304220

As for the claim that “we are on a path for hotter, drier summers”, the Met Office’s own data says otherwise. Recent summers temperatures have still not managed to top the summer of 1976, or for that matter 1995. Indeed last summer was only 0.2C hotter than 1899’s!

It is weather that is the driver for hot summers, not climate change. And, of course, summers have been getting wetter in recent decades, not drier as the Met Office projects.

Finally they claim that the ten year period from 2013 to 2022 is the warmest ten-year period on record.

It is, but barely so. UK temperature between 2013 and 2022 averaged 9.44C, compared with 9.35C between 1998 and 2007; effectively no more than a rounding error.

This lack of any real warming trend in the last two decades does not support the Met Office’s claim that hot years like 2022 will be the average by 2060.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series

FOOTNOTE

You may have noticed this attempt to blame the currently cold and damp summer on global warming:

As the above charts illustrate, UK summers have always veered from one extreme to another from year to year, how and cold, and wet and dry. You don’t need to invoke the climate bogeyman to explain away normal British weather!