Global warming: Basingstoke 'likely' to hit 42C on regularly

The UK is already seeing increasingly extreme weather, with 2020 the third warmest, fifth wettest and eighth sunniest year on record – the first ever to fall into the top 10 for all three variables.

This year’s heatwave in July forced Public Health England to issue a heat health alert for the very first time as Brits enjoyed blistering heat with highs of 32C.

But summer temperatures are “likely” to soar to 40c as global warming takes hold.

BBC and the Met Office have looked at the UK's changing climate in detail to find out how rising temperatures will affect local communities.

The tool states that Basingstoke’s hottest summer day of the past 30 years reached 34.9 degrees Celsius.

This means if global average temperatures increase two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the hottest summer day could be about 36.9 degrees Celsius.

If global temperatures rise by four degrees Celsius, tempratures could be about 42.1C.

In the past 30 summers, there were four days above 25 degrees Celsius per month on average. If global temperatures rise by two degrees Celsius, there could be 9 days.

With a four degree Celsius rise, there could be 18 days.

Image: PA

The tool also states that a four degrees Celsius rise in temperature, could cause rain fall to be eight per cent heavier with about 50mm falling per day.

But the amount of rainy days in Basingstoke would decrease from eight to six days.

Professor Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said the world was already seeing extreme heat as a result of warming of 1.1C to 1.2C above pre-industrial levels.

“If you take that up by another 0.3C, these (heatwaves) are just going to become much more intense – we’re likely to see 40C in the UK although we have never seen those kinds of temperatures (before),” she said.

“As we hit 1.5C of global warming, that’s going to not just become something that we see once or twice, it’ll start to become something that we see on a much more regular basis.”

Mike Kendon, climate scientist at the Met Office and lead author of the report, said the figures indicated a new normal for the UK.

“In seven out of the last 10 years, we’ve seen temperatures of 34C in the UK compared to seven out of the previous 50 years before that,” he said.

“So this is an indication of the fact that our baseline of our climate is changing and what we regard as normal is changing.”

Mr Kendon warned man-made global warming will last “for a very, very long time to come”, adding scientists at the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre had been “blown away” by the extreme heat of 49.6C seen on the west coast of Canada in recent weeks.

“An event like that would basically be pretty much impossible without the influence of manmade warming, that’s obviously a very severe impact,” he said.

Data published in the report The State Of The UK Climate 2020 revealed the average winter temperature for last year was 5.3C – 1.6C higher than the 1981 to 2010 average.

That makes December 2019 to February 2020 the fifth warmest winter on record, while the temperature last summer was 0.4C above average at 14.8C.

Early August 2020 saw temperatures hit 34C on six consecutive days, with five “tropical nights” where the mercury did not drop below 20C, making it one of the most significant heatwaves to affect southern England in the past 60 years, the report’s authors said.

As well as being warmer, since 2009 the UK has recorded its wettest February in 2020, its wettest April and June in 2012, the wettest November in 2009 and the wettest December in 2015, out of a series going back to 1862.

Changes in temperature and rainfall patterns are increasingly impacting the natural world, with first leaf dates in 2020 recorded an average of 10.4 days earlier than the 1999 to 2019 baseline across a range of common British shrub and tree species.

Leaves are also falling earlier, with the end-of-season bare tree dates for 2020 coming 4.3 days earlier than the baseline across the same species, the report said.