Last summer’s scorcher caught plenty of us off guard, and if the climate scientists are right, we’d better start getting used to it.
The Met Office has already flagged that the UK is around 1.1°C warmer on average than it was in pre-industrial times, and that seemingly modest number has outsized consequences for how often extreme heat events occur. Put simply, what used to be a once-in-a-decade heatwave is becoming something we can expect every few years.
Dr. Nikos Christidis, a climate attribution scientist at the Met Office, has previously noted that human-induced climate change has made UK heatwaves “at least 10 times more likely” than they were a century ago. That’s not a typo. Ten times.
So what does this summer actually look like? The early seasonal outlooks from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts suggest warmer-than-average temperatures across much of western Europe between June and August. That doesn’t guarantee a repeat of the 40.3°C record set in Coningsby in July 2022, but it certainly doesn’t rule it out either.
The Atlantic jet stream plays a huge role here. When it buckles and shifts northward, hot air from the Sahara gets a relatively clear run up through France and into Britain. It happened in 2019, it happened in 2022, and the atmospheric patterns that cause it are becoming more frequent as the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the planet.
“We’re not talking about whether heatwaves will happen,” one climate researcher put it bluntly at a recent briefing. “We’re talking about how many, and how intense.”
Of course, British weather has always delighted in defying expectations. We could easily end up with a grey, drizzly August that has everyone quietly grumbling into their barbecues. It happens.
But the broader trend is undeniable. The question isn’t really whether we’ll see more heatwaves this summer or next. It’s whether we’re finally going to take urban cooling, heat-health alerts, and infrastructure resilience seriously before the next one arrives.
Because if 2022 taught us anything, it’s that this country is not remotely prepared for the heat it’s already getting.
