Four more years of heatwaves on way

THE sweltering weather which has hit Britain is just a taste of things to come with the next four years forecast to be “abnormally hot” worldwide.

A new weather forecasting system has predicted that 2018 to 2022 will be much hotter than expected thanks to a quirk of climate change which has seen global warming slow down recently.

Research leader Dr Florian Sevellec, an associate professor in Ocean Physics at Southampton University said: “Warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is not linear – it appears to have lapsed in the early 21st century, a phenomenon known as a global warming hiatus.

“A new method for predicting mean temperatures, however, suggests the next few years will likely be hotter than expected.”

Sea surface temperatures around the world could also be very high leading to an increase in tropical storm activity, researchers say. The system, developed by the Southampton team with colleagues in France and the Netherlands, uses an algorithm rather than traditional simulation techniques.

It involves gathering information from previous changes in climate simulations to deduce future possibilities.

“Once the algorithm is ‘learned’ predictions are obtained in a few hundredths of a second on a laptop,” Dr Sevellec told the journal Nature Communications.