Why the heatwave broke Britain
Years of hand-wringing and diktats did nothing to stop the country falling apart as the mercury rose. Tom Rees and Matt Oliver report
Deep reds cover much of the map of Britain. The weatherman tells viewers to prepare for highs of more than 40C in southern England and temperatures above 30C in even the most northern reaches of Scotland. Power demand soars as Britons reach for air conditioning, staff work from home and activity on high streets and building sites comes to a halt.
This sizzling weather forecast is not from this week, though, but for July 23 2050.
Back in 2020, the Met Office made a mock 2050 forecast to show what a summer heatwave could look like in the UK as climate change turns up the temperature. The conditions have just arrived 28 years early.
Given the years of gloom to which the British public has been subjected by climate change experts and activists, however, one might imagine the country would have been ready for these highs.
But, instead, workers were bombarded with safety messages telling them to remain at home. Trains ran with severe delays, or not at all. Almost 200 schools reduced their classroom hours or closed altogether.
Runways melted, the fire brigade battled with burning buildings across the country, and even the companies which provide the backbone for the internet were reduced to spraying their air-conditioning units with water from hosepipes to prevent banks of servers from overheating and breaking down.
“Our infrastructure, our buildings, [and] the way that we live our lives is not built around that much more extreme weather that we’ve seen,” says Richard Dawson, who sits on the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) adaptation committee.
“We’re not well prepared for the kind of weather that we see today, because we’ve just seen it, and we saw how challenged our infrastructure, especially in our transport infrastructure, was.”
While many countries will suffer more soaring temperatures, Britain is also vulnerable to severe disruption because much of the country was built for a cooler age.
Lizzie Kendon, a science fellow at the Met Office, says that Britain will “have to adapt” to heatwaves.
However, the key question is, why was the country so woefully prepared this time?
From its head office by London Euston station, Network Rail – and its safety and engineering director Martin Frobisher – could see the chaos on Britain’s railways unfold at first hand on Monday.
Travellers at Euston and many more of Britain’s stations were left stranded as track buckled in the heat and whole lines were taken down with hundreds of trains cancelled. It took days to fully restore services again.
It wasn’t just climate scientists that were taken by surprise by this week’s extreme weather. Network Rail’s engineers were also shocked to see the railways facing heat never experienced before.
“The weather is getting wild but I for one wouldn’t have expected to see 40C this year,” says Frobisher.
Network Rail is now accelerating its preparations to make Britain’s railways more resilient after this week’s heatwave, he adds. A new task force led by experts including Dame Julia Slingo, the former chief scientist at the Met Office, and Sir Douglas Oakervee, the ex-chairman of HS2 and Crossrail, is conducting an urgent review for the company to look into how to avoid the chaos next time.
Network Rail is looking at whether to shift the range of temperatures that the railways can operate under as tracks expand and overhead electric cables sag in the heat, sinking to dangerous levels. Currently the UK’s railways are designed to cope with between -10C and 35C, compared with 0C and 45C in Spain and 10C and 55C in Saudi Arabia. However, there are no easy solutions. “I don’t think it’s as simplistic as saying it’s just got a bit warmer, the weather is getting wilder on many different fronts,” says Frobisher, highlighting the bitterly cold snap from the Beast from the East in 2018.
“There’s a vast amount of railway infrastructure out there and it takes a long time to renew everything.
“So our very latest systems for track, for overhead lines, are all resilient. But we’ve got an awful lot of 1970s and 1980s infrastructure, which was built to different design standards.”
The crux of the issue for policymakers is that while Britain will not suffer the highest temperatures from climate change, everything from homes to the electricity network are built for a cooler time.
And little preparation has been made to help our infrastructure cope with rapidly rising temperatures.
Without change, experts say this will become more obvious as Britain’s water and electricity networks creak under the pressure.
Kathryn Porter, an energy analyst who runs consultancy Watt Logic, says increasingly frequent heatwaves may eventually make summer just as stressful for the power grid as the winter.
“At the moment, we just don’t have the infrastructure for these hotter temperatures,” she explains.
This is because the country’s highpressure weather system means that during still, hot periods “everything works against you”.
Not only do pieces of equipment designed for cooler climates such as transformers and gas-fired power stations become less efficient, but the lack of breeze also means wind turbines produce less power – dealing a double whammy.
Even solar panels, somewhat ironically, become less efficient at temperatures above 25C. This squeeze is partly why the National Grid, which manages the electricity system, issued a notice this week for backup power generators to stand ready – an unprecedented move during the summer.
“You had all those things acting together, at a time when wind output is low because of the weather. Things got really, really tight,” Porter adds.
And the strain on the grid could become even greater in the future if legions of Britons start using air conditioning during the hotter months, something the vast majority currently don’t bother with.
Another hazard comes from power lines, which can sag in the heat and create sparks if they touch objects they shouldn’t. In dry, wooded areas, that raises the prospect of wildfires – as has been seen in places such as California.
‘At the moment, we just don’t have the infrastructure for these hotter temperatures’
Meanwhile, the dry spell has prompted water suppliers to urge British households to cut back on consumption where possible.
Water UK, which represents the industry, has urged consumers to “carefully” consider usage, cutting back where possible on the use of hosepipes and reusing water from paddling pools.
Critics have pointed out that instead of issuing edicts, the industry could help reduce the problem itself by tackling chronic leakage. Around 2.3 billion litres (515 million gallons) was lost daily through leaks in the year to March 2021 – enough to fill more than 900 Olympic swimming pools.
A lack of rain is also fuelling fears about reservoir levels. In Yorkshire, the Environment Agency has sought a drought order to slow the flow of water leaving Holme Styes reservoir near Holmfirth, amid concerns for wildlife.
Dawson at the CCC warns of the real risk of “cascading failures” from the country’s creaking infrastructure. Soaring demand for electricity as Britons turn up the air conditioning could collide with power outages, for example.
“One of the things that I worry about is not just individual impacts on say transport, it’s actually some of the interactions we’ve seen between our different infrastructures,” he says.
“So our transport relies increasingly on the electricity network. Our electricity network requires water from our rivers to help cool down thermal power stations as they’re generating electricity.
“These what we call interdependencies between our infrastructures are growing in number.”
The potatoes grown on John Watkins’s farm in Herefordshire make the chips at some of Britain’s favourite fast food chains. “I’m 68 and I’m cutting my hours, if I can, from 80 to 70 a week,” he says. “That’s what we do. I’m out on that farm every day of the week and I love it.”
Watkins puts in big shifts to help feed the nation but even he and his potatoes are hostage to the weather gods, just the latest headache for Britain’s farmers.
The heatwave and prolonged dry conditions have caused severe disruption to many potato crops across the country at a crucial time, prompting warnings of shortages and price jumps.
“We could well produce 12 to 13 tons an acre instead of the contracted 16,” Watkins says.
“On my farm [the losses are] 1,200 tons and £250,000. The fact is that the price of chips that they do have will go up to control the sales.”
Although other crops are expected to thrive in the heat – the rise of English wine offering one example, as well as a mammoth strawberry crop this year – it will take time for farmers to adapt.
“Farmers take their decisions about what to plant substantially in advance and our weather predictions can’t say a year ahead of time that ‘right at the critical moment, next year is going to be terribly hot’,” says Dr Tilly Collins at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy.
“So farmers will have to be much more cautious and will have to use crop insurance much more actively, which is very expensive for them.”
Climate change was blamed for wheat yields being down 7 per cent and 17 per cent in 2018 and 2020 respectively compared with recent averages, according to the Government’s food security report last year.
It revealed that the risk of heat stress in dairy cattle is expected to increase by more than 1,000 per cent in the southwest of England by 2050 to 2070.
And the threat of potato blight – which occurs in hot and wet weather – will rise by almost 30 per cent in parts of England and by 60 per cent in eastern Scotland.
But while farming is perhaps one of the most exposed industries, heatwaves will force a host of other industries to make changes too.
High temperatures stop work on building sites, hit the high street by tempting shoppers to stay at home, and even damage worker productivity in offices.
Many city centres ground to a halt on Monday and Tuesday as office workers resisted the allure of air-conditioned offices to avoid travel chaos caused by the heat.
Economists have used mobile phone and live bookings data to watch the economic carnage of the pandemic unfold in real time. But the figures also laid bare the hit caused by the heat to areas already struggling to adjust to a post-Covid world of homeworking.
Footfall on high streets slumped by 7 per cent across the UK on Monday compared with a week earlier, according to Springboard, while OpenTable data suggest there were far fewer people eating out at the start of the week.
Google mobility data show that public transport usage was down by 30 per cent on pre-Covid trends on Monday, compared with minus 23 per cent the previous Monday. Footfall in retail and creation areas was down by 13 per cent while activity in residential areas was up by 10 per cent.
In London, which is more reliant on the smooth running of trains and Tubes, public transport usage was 38 per cent lower than pre-Covid trends and activity in workplaces was down by 42 per cent, much worse than a week earlier.
However, the bigger economic effect of hotter weather may be less tangible than shoppers on the high street and diners eating out.
Labour productivity – the efficiency of a worker, usually measured as output per hour worked – is also hurt by stifling heat, particularly in countries not set up for it. Forecasters believe it can cost the economy billions of pounds.
Helia Costa, an economist who worked on the issue for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, says: “When heat increases, workers’ ability to perform their jobs decreases. Their cognitive capacity decreases and physical capacity decreases so they feel less energy or loss of concentration, muscle cramps, exhaustion.
“These losses in productivity have negative impacts on the economy.”
Costa’s research suggests that a warm year in the latter part of this century would cost London’s economy £1.6billion based on 2005 prices, a hit equivalent to 0.4 per cent of output. Further south it will be even worse, with Bilbao in northern Spain estimated to suffer a 9.5 per cent hit to output and Antwerp in Belgium facing a 2.1 per cent knock.
Hotter temperatures could reduce growth rates significantly. The Richmond Fed estimates that a one-degree Fahrenheit increase reduces output by 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points over the period of the temperature rise.
James Pomeroy, an HSBC economist, says the impact on productivity from limited working hours or businesses being unable to function could be “sizeable” in many countries.
He says the research suggests “the biggest drags would come from real estate, services and agriculture” and the average annual growth rate in the US being pulled down by 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points over the next 100 years.
More than 2 per cent of total working hours globally will be lost every year because staff will not work in the heat or go at a slower pace, according to the UN’s International Labour Organisation. In parts of Asia and Africa, 5 per cent of hours could be lost.
In western and northern Europe, the bulk of the lost hours are in the construction and agriculture industries, largely owing to the composition of these advanced economies.
In the Arabian peninsula, work is already banned for several hours in the middle of the day in summer because of the extreme temperatures. But such bans for exposed workers could spread further.
The impact will be worse in cities, which are hotter than rural areas – an effect known as an urban heat island.
The productivity hit could also be bigger for Britain’s army of homeworkers, compared with those who are still in the office, given that few houses in Britain have air conditioning.
Many of Britain’s buildings are designed to trap heat in a cooler climate. With one of the oldest housing stocks in Europe, Britain is neither served well by its buildings in summer or winter and unsuitable properties are still being developed.
A report by the CCC, the Government’s official climate adviser, last year found that more than 570,000 homes have been built since 2016 that are not suitable for high temperatures, requiring “costly retrofit to make them safe, habitable and water efficient in the future”. It warned a further 1.5 million will be built in the next five years, causing more costs further down the line. There is an irony that some modern innovations – for example, buildings constructed with windows that do not open, as a way of limiting heat loss – may be making the situation worse.
N ot everyone agrees we should lose our shirts over rising temperatures, however.
Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, last week complained that while many people clamour for hot weather throughout the year, the country shuts down whenever it arries.
“This is not a brave new world but a cowardly new world, where we live in a country where we are frightened of the heat,” he said.
“It is not surprising that in snowflake Britain, the snowflakes are melting. Thankfully, most of us are not snowflakes.”
Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, encouraged Britons to “enjoy the sunshine”, providing they took “common sense” precautions such as drinking water and applying sun cream.
However, experts have been quick to warn that while these are the sorts of temperature rises you might enjoy on a relaxing jolly to Spain, they are much harder to cope with in normal life, for months on end.
In Italy, where summer temperatures melt tarmac and make railings and cash points too hot to touch, “red alerts” are issued during heatwaves and hospitals brace for an influx of admissions. Some local authorities even open air-conditioned refuges for vulnerable people such as the elderly.
This year’s heatwave has been so intense that Italian authorities have issued such warnings for 14 cities and the country’s northern regions are battling their worst draught for 70 years.
Penny Endersby, chief executive of the Met Office, was quick to tell Britons last week that they shouldn’t be enjoying themselves.
“Here in the UK we are used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun,” she said.
“This is not that sort of weather. Our lifestyles and our infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming.”
Heatwaves may well become more common in the years ahead. But it is not clear the country is yet willing to adapt.