UK summers could be ‘6C warmer by 2070’ under high emission pathway as climate change ‘loads the dice’

UK summers will be up to 6C warmer by 2070 if it takes the pathway of high emissions over the next decades, the Met Office has warned.

The forecaster said “change is already happening” and “further into the future we look, the more likely we are to see record hot temperatures or heavy rainfall events” in the UK if a high emissions scenario is considered.

A high emissions pathway would “almost certainly” breach the 1.5C global warming threshold agreed upon in the 2015 Paris “if followed to the end of the century,” a Met Office spokesperson said.

The UK has already warmed by 1C since around the 1950s and there have been longer and more frequent hot spells.

Dr Emma Ferranti, associate professor in civil engineering at the University of Birmingham, said global average temperatures are increasing because climate change is “loading the dice” meaning that UK summers are “getting a little warmer and our winters a little milder.”

She added that “on an Earth with no climate change there would still be extreme summer temperatures” but climate change is “making these temperatures hotter and increasing the frequency that they occur.”

Dr Mariam Zachariah, research associate at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, also confirmed that the UK has “a climate change signal” which is “not surprising given our planet is now 1.2C hotter compared to the pre-industrial revolution era.”

Five of the hottest UK days on record have occurred since 2015, with the hottest day recorded last year in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, when the mercury reached 40.3C.

Temperatures last summer joined the hottest summer on record in 2018, and Dr Ferranti said “hot summers like 2018 will happen every other summer by 2050.”

This year, the Met Office has said that the UK experienced its hottest June since records began - smashing the previous records recorded in 1940 and 1976.

The average monthly temperature in June 2023 reached 15.8C. This marked a 0.9C increase on the record last set almost four decades ago.

Not long after, the director of climate services at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), Professor Christopher Hewitt, warned the world is “in uncharted territory” as it experienced its hottest week on record and more record-breaking figures are expected.

The Met Office said that if a high emissions scenario continues by 2070, compared to the climate in 1990, the UK could see the average hottest summer day between 4 and 7C warmer and summers between 1 and 6C warmer, and up to 60% drier depending on the region.

The chance of exceeding 30C for two days or more will be 16 times more likely in the south, and the chance of exceeding 40C will be similar to the chance of exceeding 32C in 1990, the forecaster warned.

Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said the UK’s average temperatures “will continue to rise until the world’s greenhouse gas emissions drop to zero”.

He added: “That demands some pretty rapid action if UK’s warm – but not hot – summers aren’t to become a historical relic. ”

Friends of the Earth’s head of policy, Mike Childs, said “climate change is heating the planet” bringing not just warmer weather but storms, droughts and flooding which “are also expected to become more frequent and more severe.”

He said the UK government “must end its love affair with increasingly costly fossil fuels and build the greener, safer future we so urgently need”.

Dr Zacharia warned that unless carbon emissions are rapidly reduced the UK can expect “average temperatures to continue to rise in the future” alongside an “increased risk of heatwaves and wildfire.”

Dr Gareth Clay, reader in physical geography at the University of Manchester, told NationalWorld that there will be more days in the year with “very high” fire danger and consistently higher temperatures means the length of the fire season will increase.

Wildfires are “becoming more severe and widespread due to climate change”, according to Professor Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office.

He added that limiting global warming to well below 2C “would help avoid further increases in the risk of extreme fire weather.”