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The UK’s hottest year in 2022 — when temperatures rose to a record 40C in the summer — will be considered “average” by about 2060 if the world keeps warming, the Met Office has concluded.
In its annual report, the Met Office said the unprecedented warmth in 2022 would no longer be considered unusual by 2100 if global warming reached 2-3C, compared with pre-industrial levels. Instead, a year like 2022 would be considered “cool” by the end of the century.
Long term global average temperatures have risen by at least 1.1C, and current government policies set the world on track for warming of between 2.4C and 2.6C, the UN has warned.
The UK is expected to get hotter and dryer in summer and wetter in winter as the warming accelerates.
Last year was the first in which the UK’s annual mean temperature was above 10C. The chance of that happening was now around “one in every three to four years” compared with about one in 500 “in a world without climate change”, said Mike Kendon, lead author of the report.
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“Climate change has greatly increased the chance of a year like 2022,” said Kendon.
Temperature extremes and record breaking events were becoming more common, with records also now being broken by wider margins than in the past, he added.
The report comes as the Sunak government moves to soften its green policies, with the prime minister saying this week that reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions had to be done in a “proportionate” way. The Labour opposition is also under competing pressures from unions and climate experts on green issues, such as fossil fuel production in the North Sea.
Energy secretary Grant Shapps has said the government would “max out” the UK’s reserves of polluting North Sea oil and gas.
But the former chair of the government’s climate advisory committee, Lord Deben, also known as John Gummer, told a parliamentary committee this month that the policy of continued new North Sea oil and gas production was a mistake.
In an interview with the Financial Times, he branded as a “failure” of leadership the Westminster politics that he said deterred the government from doing more to tackle climate change.
Scientists have warned that extreme weather events — such as the record breaking heat and wildfires presently affecting parts of Europe — will become more frequent and intense with every fraction of a degree of warming.
Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said the UK’s weather in 2022 was “very much a sign of things to come”.
All months in 2022 except December were hotter than average, and the decade to 2022 was the warmest 10-year period for the UK in records dating back to 1884, the Met Office found.
The report also showed that sea levels around the UK had risen by about 18.5cm since the 1900s, roughly 11.4cm of which had occurred during the past 30 years, indicating a rising pace of change.
Although 2022 was a relatively dry year — something that contributed to the droughts that gripped much of England and Wales later in the summer — five of the 10 wettest years for the UK have occurred since 2000, the Met Office said.
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