Study: Climate change made UK heatwave hotter

Human-caused climate change made last week’s deadly heat wave in England and Wales at least 10 times more likely and added a few degrees to how brutally hot it got, a study said.

A team of international scientists found the heat wave that set a new national record high at 40.3C was made stronger and more likely by the buildup of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. They that temperatures were 2C to 4C warmer in the heat wave than they would have been without climate change, depending on which method scientists used.

The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal yet but follows scientifically accepted techniques, and past such studies have been published months later.

“We would not have seen temperatures above 40 degrees in the UK without climate change,” study senior author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, said in an interview. “The fingerprint is super strong.”

World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists across the globe who do real-time studies of extreme weather to see if climate change played a role in an extreme weather event and if so how much of one, looked at two-day average temperatures for July 18 and 19 in much of England and Wales and the highest temperature reached in that time.

The daily highest temperatures were the most unusual, a one-in1000-year event in the current warmer world, but “almost impossible in a world without climate change,” the study said.

Last week’s heat smashed the old national record by 1.6C. The average over two hot days and nights is a once a century event now but is “nearly impossible” without climate change.