This year will be Britain’s warmest since records began in 1659

This year will be Britain’s warmest since records began, say scientists
· Surge in temperature astounds weather experts
· Man - not nature - is to blame, researchers say

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday December 14, 2006
Guardian

Britain is on course for the warmest year since records began, according to figures from the Met Office and the University of East Anglia yesterday. Temperatures logged by weather stations across England reveal 2006 to have been unusually mild, with a mean temperature of 10.84C. The record beats the previous two joint hottest years of 1999 and 1990 by 0.21C.
Temperatures in central England have been recorded since 1659, the world’s longest climate record, and they indicate the trend towards warming weather across Britain as a whole.

Experts are convinced that the warming can only be explained by rising greenhouse gases from human activity and rule out the impact of natural variations, such as the sun’s intensity. “Our climate models show we should be getting warmer and drier weather in the summer, and warmer and wetter in the winter, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing,” said Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia. “I cannot see how else this can be explained.”

Soaring summer temperatures and an exceptionally warm autumn were the main forces driving annual temperatures to record levels, with July being the warmest month ever recorded at 19.7C and September an exceptional 16.8C. The summer heatwave was caused by a high pressure weather system loitering over the Alps from July to August. Highs are associated with air currents that spin clockwise, so on the western side Britain was warmed by air sucked up from north Africa. The high brought chilly northerlies down to east European countries.

In July, temperatures reached 33C (91F) across an area of central and southern England from Hereford to Bedfordshire, with 29.5C recorded at Prestwick, near Glasgow, and 30C in Castlederg, Northern Ireland. The heatwave put the Department of Health on level three alert - one away from emergency levels - and elderly and vulnerable people were advised to drink lots, stay out of the sun in the afternoon and wear loose clothing.

In the autumn, predominantly south-westerly air currents brought warm air to southern Britain from Spain and Portugal.

The record year has astounded scientists. “What’s phenomenal about this year is that some of these months have broken records by incredible amounts. This year it was 0.8C warmer in autumn and 0.5C warmer between April and October than the previous warmest years. Normally these records are broken by around one tenth of a degree or so,” said Prof Jones.

A study this year by Peter Stott at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change found that warming over the past 50 years could only be explained by climbing emissions of greenhouse gases. A 1C rise in the past five decades was only reproduced by climate models when human-induced greenhouse gas emissions were included.

In 2004 Dr Stott and scientists at Oxford University showed that human emissions of greenhouse gases had more than doubled the risk of record-breaking heatwaves such as the one reckoned to have killed 27,000 people across Europe in 2003. The Met Office figures show that 2006 is set to be 1.37C warmer than the mean temperature logged over the four decades from 1961. The previous two hottest years, 1990 and 1999, both recorded mean temperatures of 10.63C.

All of the 10 warmest years in Britain have occurred in the past 18 years, except the fourth hottest, when in 1949 the year’s mean temperature reached 10.62C.

Other figures released by the Met Office yesterday reveal that global temperatures have risen too, with 2006 on track to become the sixth warmest year since records began in 1850. The latest figures mean that the 10 warmest years ever have all occurred in the past 12 years. Some scientists already predict a warmer year in 2007, in large part because of a natural phenomenon called El Niño in the eastern Pacific, which is expected to have a profound effect on climate.

Mild warming is not expected to be overly problematic for the UK, but the trend towards drier summers has already seen a two-year drought devastate groundwater supplies in southern England, while sudden downpours have triggered flash flooding. Though scientists are not able to pin a single year’s record temperatures on global warming, the long-term trend towards a warming climate is now irrefutable, they claim, and should be taken seriously by policy makers.

“The government is making many of the right noises, but we really should be doing more,” said Prof Jones. “We were the first country to industrialise, why can’t we become the first to really reduce our emissions? I despair when I hear the government talking about extensions to airports, when air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. It’s as if there’s a belief in government that this will sort itself out.”