The United Kingdom may record over 40ºC in the summer, although global warming will be limited to 1.5ºC, meteorologists warned on Thursday (29).
This ceiling corresponds to the most ambitious goal set by the Paris Agreement to control global warming compared to the pre-industrial era. The British presidency of COP26, which is scheduled to take place in Glasgow in November, hopes to keep it “alive”. However, according to many scientists, this goal has not already been achieved.
This Thursday, when the Climate Report for the United Kingdom for 2020 was released, the Director General of the Royal Meteorological Association, Liz Bentley, highlighted that the planet was already recording episodes of extreme heat. The temperature will increase from 1.1 to C to 1.2 to C.
“If we add 0.3 C ‘these heat waves’ will be more and more intense and it looks like we are going to see 40 ° C in the UK, although we have never seen that temperature level,” he said.
The highest temperature ever recorded in the UK was 38.7 C in Cambridge on July 25, 2019.
“If global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius, we will see it once or twice,” but “we usually see,” he said.
Mike Kenton, the author of the report, told the BBC that it was “believable” that the UK would reach 40 degrees Celsius in the summer, and that climate change was already taking place in Britain, as is the case in other parts of the world.
