After a summer marked by the country’s highest recorded temperature, provisional figures reported by Britain’s national weather service on Wednesday showed that the year 2022 would be the warmest year on record for the United Kingdom.
Besides the summer peak, the Met Office said all four seasons in Britain in 2022 were in the top ten warmest since records began in 1884 and this year’s average temperature will likely beat the previous all-time high of 9.88C, set in 2014.
“While many will remember the summer’s extreme heat, what has been noteworthy this year has been the relatively consistent heat through the year, with every month except December being warmer than average,” Mark McCarthy, the head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre, was quoted to have said.
This year alone, Britain’s weather events included the country recording July as its hottest day to date with temperatures exceeding 40C (104°F) and a drought declared in parts of England for the first time since 2018.
The London Fire Brigade declared a “major incident” with hundreds of firefighters battling blazes across the capital sparked by the heat as the Brigade endured its busiest day since World War Two.
The national weather service also issued its first red warning for extreme temperatures in July for parts of England “where illness and death may occur among the fit and healthy, and not just in high-risk groups”.
According to Dr Mark McCarthy, a senior climate scientist at the Met Office, the provisional figures are in line with the real impacts expected as a result of human-induced climate change.
“Although it doesn’t mean every year will be the warmest on record, climate change continues to increase the chances of increasingly warm years over the coming decades,” Dr McCarthy said.
The conditions led the Met Office’s Chief of Science and Technology Stephen Belcher, at the time to warn that if the UK continues under a high emission scenario, it could see temperatures like that every three years, adding that the only way to stabilise the climate was to achieve net zero carbon emission.
Story was adapted from Reuters.
