The UK is at risk of summer temperatures exceeding 40 ° C even if global warming remains limited to 1.5 ° C, meteorologists warned Thursday.

This threshold corresponds to the most ambitious objective set by the Paris agreement to limit global warming compared to the industrial era, which the British presidency of the COP26, scheduled for November in Glasgow, hopes to keep "alive" .

However, according to many scientists, it is largely out of reach for the moment.

More intense heat

On the occasion of the publication on Thursday of the UK climate report for the year 2020, the Executive Director of the Royal Meteorological Society, Liz Bentley, stressed that the planet is already experiencing extreme heat resulting from a warming of 1, 1 to 1.2 ° C.

"If we add another 0.3 ° C", these heat waves "are going to become more and more intense - we will probably see 40 ° C in the UK although we have never experienced this kind of temperature", he said. she declared.

The highest temperature on record in the UK is 38.7 ° C, a record high reached on July 25, 2019 in Cambridge.

An already "warm" winter

“By reaching 1.5 ° C of global warming, it will not only be something that we will see once or twice,” but “something that we will see on a regular basis,” she added. Mike Kendon, the author of the report, judged on the BBC that 40 ° C in summer in the UK is "plausible", pointing out that global warming is already manifesting in the UK as in the rest of the world.

According to the report, the year 2020 is the third warmest, the fifth wettest, the eighth sunniest and the first to pass in the top 10 of these three criteria.

The average winter temperature was 5.3 ° C, 1.6 ° C higher than the average observed between 1981 and 2010. With 34 ° C reached six days in a row at the beginning of August 2020, the south of England reached l one of the biggest heat waves of the past 60 years.

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