UK summer was hottest on record, Met Office says, after severe heat, drought

By Sam Tobin

LONDON, Sept 1 (Reuters) – Britain had its hottest summer since records began, provisional Met Office statistics published on Tuesday said, after a season of intense heat and ​drought that has tested infrastructure, food production and wildfire-fighting ‌capacity.

The agency said Britain had experienced record warmth for the second summer in a row, according to statistics that go back to 1884, as man-made climate change has greatly increased the likelihood of extreme weather.

The country’s five warmest ‌summers ​have all been recorded since 2003.

On the ⁠day meteorological autumn begins ⁠in Britain, the Met Office said this summer’s average mean temperature of 16.5 degrees Celsius (61.7 degrees Fahrenheit) was “made around 130 times more likely due to human-induced climate change”.

In a climate free ​from human-generated greenhouse gases, the UK would experience a summer like 2026 roughly once in 1,000 years, Mark McCarthy, the ⁠agency’s head of climate attribution, said.

“In our ⁠current climate, which is changing because of the ​effect of burning of fossil fuels, we should now expect this to ​be roughly a 1-in-9 year event,” he added in ‌a statement.

SEVERE HEAT IS INCREASINGLY NORMAL

Compared with even hotter temperatures in mainland Europe – where heatwaves have claimed hundreds of lives, disrupted power supplies and shut schools – the consequences in Britain are relatively mild.

A ⁠drought has, however, been declared in much of the country and Britain has endured an unprecedented number of wildfires, which in extreme cases ⁠destroyed homes.

Heat and drought ‌have also affected farming, with Britain’s cereal ⁠harvest on track to be the worst since ​comparable records ‌began in 1984.

Already in July, the Met Office ​said extreme ⁠weather was increasingly normal.

Even though this summer was on average hotter than previously recorded, the peak temperature of 38.1 C (100.58 F) in London on August 13 this year was only the fifth-hottest day on record for the UK.

(Reporting by Sam Tobin; editing by William James ​and Barbara Lewis)