Climate change makes England's 32C June heat 100 times more likely

Euronews

20-06-2025

The 32°C heat expected in large parts of England tomorrow has been made 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change, an extremely rapid scientific analysis shows.
Prior to the mass burning of coal, oil and gas, a day reaching 32°C heat in June would be extremely rare in the UK - arriving once every 2,500 years on average. Now, with the world teetering 1.3°C above pre-industrial times, such days will strike once every five years.
That's according to the World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international team of scientists who analyse the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events. They typically take longer to produce a full attribution analysis, which uses climate models and weather data.
Today's report is a slimmer, lightning-fast piece of research that highlights the 'overlooked threat' of extreme heat on people's health.
'It is totally insane we have political leaders in the UK trying to drag us back to the past with calls for more fossil fuels,' says co-author Dr Friederike Otto, Associate Professor in Climate Science at Imperial College London's Centre for Environmental Policy.
'The climate will continue to drive increasingly dangerousheatwaves, fires and floods in the UK until emissions are reduced to net zero globally.'
WWA's analysis follows a Met Office report released on Wednesday, which found the UK's chance of 40°C days has been increasing rapidly and is now over 20 times more likely than it was in the 1960s.
A week of intense heat in the UK is expected to peak on Saturday, with temperatures as high as 34°C possible in eastern England according to the Met Office forecast on Thursday.
In the UK, a heatwave is called when temperatures exceed a certain threshold, which varies from region to region, for three consecutive days. In southeast England, that level is 28°C.
WWA's study shows that these heatwave conditions are now 10 times more likely due to climate change. Before humans heated the climate with fossil fuels, such events were expected every 50 years. Today, the likelihood is every five years.
Overall, June heatwaves are now 2-4°C more intense due to climate change, the scientists say. A previous WWA analysis of the 2022 UK heatwave - when temperatures exceeded 40°C for the first time - found that climate change made the temperatures 2°C hotter and about 100 times more likely.
'Saturday could well end up being the hottest day so far this year, with highs around 33°C locally from Lincolnshire to the London area,' Lars Lowinski, a meteorologist at Weather and Radar who wasn't involved in the study, told Euronews Green earlier in the week.
'This is quite exceptional for June. The highest 21 June so far was in 2017 when 34.5°C was recorded in the London area. The overall June record in the UK is 35.6°C in 1976.'
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued an Amber Heat Health Alert for the whole of England, from midday yesterday until 9am on Monday 23 June, to prepare the health and social care sector.
'For the most vulnerable, temperatures above 28°C are dangerous in the UK, especially in June, before people have acclimatised to hotter weather,' says Maja Vahlberg, technical advisor at Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and WWA report co-author.
'Sadly, most people die from heat indoors and alone, especially older populations and people with underlying health conditions, such as lung or heart disease.'
Dr Agostinho Sousa, Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection at UKHSA, has urged people to 'check on friends, family and neighbours who are more vulnerable and to take sensible precautions while enjoying the sun.'
But WWA's report points to more structural issues too, flagging the need for urgent climate adaptation in the UK.
Dr Otto describes the way heat risks are magnified by inequality: 'People working in air-conditioned offices will probably be okay this week, but poorer people working outdoors, in kitchens, and in other hot environments endure these conditions all day and then return to poorly insulated flats that can become dangerously hot.
'Making our societies more equal is essential to reduce the impacts of climate change.'
Theodore Keeping, wildfire researcher at Imperial College London's Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, also flags the high risk of wildfires this week - given soaring temperatures follow an extremely dry spring.
'People going outside to enjoy the warm weather should not be using fire or disposable barbecues, dispose of cigarette butts carefully and should immediately notify emergency services if they do notice a fire,' he says.
Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study released today.
The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not.
The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius of long-term warming since preindustrial times.
That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gas, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year.
'Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse faster,' said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth.
'We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one.'
That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change.
Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heatwaves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations.
Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures.
In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tonnes (130 billion metric tonnes) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable.
The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote.
The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said.
The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, Hausfather said.
And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said.
'It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere,' said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England.
'I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change.'
The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in.
That all shows up in Earth's energy imbalance, which is now 25 per cent higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said.
Earth's energy imbalance 'is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system,' Hausfather said.
Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. 'It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome,' he said.
The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years.
Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works.
That 1.5 is 'a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies,' said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said.
He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded.
Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the US and around the world - unprecedented heatwaves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms,' said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study.
Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn't focus on that particular threshold.
'Missing it does not mean the end of the world,' Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that 'each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts.'