Last week’s record heat wave in the UK was at least 10 times more likely to be caused by climate change, according to a new study.
Hundreds of people are expected to have died during the scorching weather, although official figures have not yet emerged, according to a quick analysis by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.
There were estimates of over 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 temperature record of 40.3C was set in Coningsby, Lincolnshire on 19 July, 1.6C higher than the previous record set just three years ago.
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2:42 The couple returns to the burnt house
The impacts of heat waves are often “very unevenly distributed across demographics”, and poorer neighborhoods often lack green space, shade and water, said Emmanuel Raju of the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Disaster Research .
The heat wave swept across much of Europe this month.
But the group chose the UK for its latest analysis because the country “is particularly unaccustomed to very high temperatures like the ones we’ve seen last week,” added Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Imperial College London.
Of the sites the group looked at, the temperatures recorded at two of them would have been “statistically impossible” if the world had not warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, the paper said.
The international network is at the forefront of science to rapidly quantify 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 analysis of historical weather records.
Although computer simulations suggested climate change had increased temperatures in the heatwave by 2°C, analysis of historical records indicated it would be around 4°C colder in pre-industrial times , before global warming began to increase temperatures.
The 10-fold increase in the chance of such extreme heat hitting the UK due to climate change is a “conservative estimate”, because “extreme temperatures” have increased more than climate models estimate, the authors said .
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2:51 Drought is “very likely” in parts of the UK
This also suggests that the consequences of the climate crisis for heat waves could be even worse than previously thought.
“There must be something in the climate system that has a stronger influence here … that is simply not captured in the models,” Dr Otto explained for 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, up from one in 1,000 in a no-change climate.
“It’s been worrying 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, attribution scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who also worked on in the document.
Professor Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University, said the group should have included margins of error in their estimates, given the challenges of current climate models.
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