Hundreds of people are expected to have died during the hot weather, although no official figures have yet been released, according to a rapid analysis by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group. There were estimates of more than 840 additional deaths in England and Wales on 18 and 19 July. The extreme weather caused widespread disruption to transport networks and hundreds of fires, including devastating fires that destroyed homes. During the heatwave, a new national record temperature of 40.3C was set in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, on July 19 – 1.6C higher than the previous mark set just three years ago. Use Chrome browser for more accessible video player 2:42 Couple returns to burnt house The effects of heat waves are often “very unevenly distributed across demographics,” with poorer neighborhoods often lacking green spaces, shade and water, said Emmanuel Raju, of the University of Copenhagen’s Copenhagen Disaster Research Center. Heatwave has swept across much of Europe this month. But the team chose the UK for its latest analysis because the country is “particularly unusual in very high temperatures like those we saw last week”, added Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London. Of the places the team analyzed, the temperatures recorded at two of them would have been “statistically impossible” if the world had not warmed by about 1.2C since the late 1800s, the paper said. The international network is at the forefront of the science of rapidly quantifying the role of climate change in recent extreme weather events. The 21 researchers involved in this study compared the global climate as it is today, after 1.2 C of warming, with an analysis of historical weather records. While computer simulations suggested climate change had raised temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius, analysis of historical records showed it would have been about 4 degrees cooler in the pre-industrial era, before global warming began to raise temperatures. A tenfold increase in the chances of such extreme heat hitting the UK due to climate change is a “conservative estimate” because “extreme temperatures” have risen more than climate models estimate, the authors said. Use Chrome browser for more accessible video player 2:51 Drought ‘very likely’ for parts of UK This also suggests that the consequences of the climate crisis for heatwaves could be even worse than previously thought. “There must be something in the climate system that has a stronger influence here … that is just not being captured in the models,” Dr Otto explained of Western Europe. Two years ago, Met Office scientists found that the chance of seeing 40C in the UK was now one in 100 in any given year, down from one in 1,000 in an unchanged climate. “It’s disappointing to see an event like this happen so soon after this study, to see the raw data coming back from our weather stations,” said Fraser Lott, performance scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who also worked on paper. Professor Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, said the team should have included a margin of error in their estimates, given the challenges of current climate models. Watch the Daily Climate Show at 3.30pm. Monday to Friday and The Climate Show with Tom Heap on Saturday and Sunday at 3.30pm and 7.30pm. All on Sky News, the Sky News website and app, YouTube and Twitter. The show explores how global warming is changing our landscape and highlights solutions to the crisis.
