A report has found that the water near the UK’s coasts was hotter in 2023 than scientists have ever before recorded, with children today experiencing a hotter and wetter climate than that in which their parents and grandparents grew up.
According to the State of the UK Climate 2023 report, the sea surface temperature near coasts was 0.9C hotter and winter rainfall across the country was 24% greater over the last decade than the average from 1961 to 1990. It found the number of “hot” (28C) days has more than doubled over that period, and the number of “very hot” (30C) and “extremely hot” (32C) days has more than tripled.
Since the UK hit 40C heat for the first time in 2022 – “absolutely smashing records” – the scientists behind the annual report started to pay more attention to extremes, said Mike Kendon, a climate scientist at the Met Office who was the lead author of the report.
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The scientists found the number of “very wet” days was 20% greater in the last decade than in the 1961-1990 period.
The mass burning of coal, oil and gas since the 1850s – together with the boom in livestock farming and heavy industry – has heated the planet by 1.3C and upended weather patterns that used to vary only naturally. The report found human activity had made the UK’s unusually high average temperature last year 150 times more likely.
Still, projections show that “2023 will be a fairly average year by the middle of the century and a fairly cool year by the end of the century,” said Kendon. “It’s a really dramatic indicator that our climate will be pushed out of the envelope of the historical range.”
The UK, which has pumped more planet-heating gas into the atmosphere than all but a handful of countries, according to an analysis from Carbon Brief – is already suffering from increasingly violent weather that scientists have traced back to the breakdown of a stable climate. An analysis in May found that a spell of “never-ending” rain in the UK and Ireland last autumn and winter was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by global heating.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
