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LONDON – Has it ever been so hot in the history of mankind in the British Isles? Maybe not.
If you want to mark an unnatural, frightening, real-world data point on climate change, it’s here in Britain right now, where temperatures are expected to rise to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, an extreme weather episode . , a strange hot spot, which has not been seen since the maintenance of modern records began a century and a half ago.
And probably not since the observation of time was taken seriously here in 1659. And perhaps much more.
Reaching 40ºC, for British climate scientists, is a kind of unicorn event that had appeared on their models, but until recently it seemed almost unbelievable and unattainable soon.
Houston? Islamabad? New Delhi? Not surprising when they are hot as an oven.
But London? The city of high latitudes, with its recorded history dating back to the Romans, has probably never experienced temperatures like those predicted today.
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Surely no Briton lives now, neither his great-grandparents nor his great-grandparents, has felt 40ºC without traveling abroad. Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, Henry VIII? They have never faced a day of 40ºC.
This nation was not built to withstand so much heat. Their homes, workplaces, roads, railroads, hospitals, and infrastructure were built for a temperate climate, Shakespeare’s “other Eden, the semi-paradise,” not this hell.
Monday night was already the warmest night on record in the UK, according to provisional figures, with the British struggling to sleep, as temperatures remained above 25 ºC in some places.
Firefighters continued to fight wildfires in Spain, Greece and France on July 17, while extreme heat gripped Western Europe. (Video: Reuters)
Britain has some of the most extensive weather records in the world, recorded through newspapers, observations, and instruments since the Enlightenment, including daily records archived from the 1770s and monthly highs and lows dating back to the 1770s. 1660.
Currently, the highest official temperature is 38.7 ° C (101.7 ° F), recorded at the Cambridge Botanical Garden on July 25, 2019. Almost all of the highest temperatures recorded occur in recent years.
“We’re absolutely certain we haven’t recorded a 40ºC day dating back to the mid-1850s,” Mark McCarthy, manager of the Office of Meteorology’s National Climate Information Center, told The Washington Post, referring -at the beginning of the measurement of meteorological service instruments. temperature records.
These maps show the excessive heat in Europe and the US
Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bristol, was willing to travel back in time. “There is no direct evidence that the UK has exceeded 40ºC in the last 6,000 years or so,” he told The Post.
It would return to the Middle Holocene.
With warnings, Farnsworth warned.
To delve deeper into prehistory, before instrument data, scientists must rely on indicators that tell them average temperatures over long periods of time, looking at lake and marine sediments, ice cores, corals, glaciations, insects in swamps. , tree rings, etc. to love the past climate.
Over the last 2,000 years, it became warmer in Britain during the warm medieval period, between 750 and 1350, but probably not as hot as in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, most scientists say.
The medieval Domesday Book, completed in 1086 as a sort of census, had 45 vineyards in Britain, as far north as York, so it was hot enough to grow grape vines, a tradition brought to the island by ancient Romans.
Then there was the Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850, when the northern hemisphere cooled again. This warming and cooling was not caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, as today, but by the subtle tilt and hesitation of the planet as it faced the sun.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents the authorized consensus of global scientists, reported in 2021 that, in general, and on average, the Earth is now warmer than it has been in 125,000 years.
Europe faced the spread of forest fires and the rising death toll amid extreme heat on 18 July. (Video: Alexa Juliana Ard, Rick Noack / The Washington Post)
Some experts in paleoclimate studies say that it is possible that to overcome the heat of the 21st century in Britain, you would have to go back to the optimal climate of the Miocene, about 15 million years ago, when the world seemed quite different today. . By then, the continents were circling. There were different seas and mountain ranges. There were mammals, but not humans.
Myles Allen, a professor of geoscience at Oxford University, suggested caution. He said that since the 1850s there has never been a day with 40ºC. But the more you look back in time, the more blurred the image can be.
One notable thing, Allen said, is the accuracy of climate models, both to predict the future and to look back in time.
Met Office researchers have reported that in the “natural climate” of the pre-industrial world, there could be a day every 7,000 years that Britain could face 40ºC.
Today, the probability is once every 100 or 300 years, and it grows. According to the models, a 40ºC day could happen once every 15 years in 2100 if countries meet their carbon emissions promises, or once every 3 or 4 years if they continue to emit as much pollution as they do today.
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Simon Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University who was born and raised in North Yorkshire, England, wrote on his blog that the idea of 40 ° C was a “seemingly unthinkable temperature for a country with a population aging that does not have a widespread residential population. air conditioning. “
But “everything changed” on June 30, he wrote, with the publication of a forecast model of the joint global forecasting system sprinkled with 40C in the south-east of England. “Given that the UK’s hottest days in the past had only topped 38 ° C locally, this didn’t look like anything anyone had seen before.” Scientists were initially skeptical. Not more.
Hannah Cloke, a natural risk researcher at the University of Reading, told The Post, “We thought the models were wrong,” but today we are “sitting in the middle of a changing climate.”
“It’s unprecedented,” he said, this kind of foresight, “where we could see and feel something we’ve never experienced here before.”