Sometimes it starts with "Phew" and sometime it is "Cor", and there can also be more than one exclamation mark, depending on how daring the editor is feeling. But always there’s the mock-Cockney pastiche of Brits trying to cope with warm weather, accompanying images of seaside crowds, knotted hankies on heads and stripy deckchairs on stony beaches.
This week the heat has been about way more than just an opportunity for the British to have a self-deprecating laugh at their inability to cope as the temperature climbs.
It is not that unusual for England — particularly its southeast and eastern counties and London, not too far away from the furnace of mainland Europe — to have a handful of uncomfortable summer afternoons with maximum temperatures in the low 30s. Wales, Scotland and Ireland, being further north and further west, tend to be much cooler and protected from the worst of the heat which drifts up from the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, with temperatures in the mid to high 20s about as hot as it usually gets there.
Until this week, the highest temperature recorded in the United Kingdom was 38.7degC in Cambridge in July 2019. But on Tuesday, 39 places set new records in the high 30s or just above 40degC, with Coningsby in Lincolnshire reaching 40.3degC and several sites around London peaking at 40.1degC or 40.2degC.
As you can imagine, for a country which has kept temperature recordings longer than anywhere else in the world, there’s a wealth of statistics and figures which show just how extraordinary the freak — until now, at least — heatwave was. Wales and Scotland also hit their highest temperatures on record, with 37.1degC at Hawarden and 35.1degC at Floors Castle respectively.
The UK Met Office said days about 40degC currently had a return period of one every 300 or so years. But in a sign of what is to come as extreme heat becomes more normal, that is likely to drop to once each 15 years by the end of the century, even if current emissions reduction pledges are met.
Forty-degree days are now 10 times more likely in the UK than they were if the climate was not warming, the Met Office said. So why should we care about what is happening half a world away? Are there lessons which New Zealand can learn from what might have seemed just a decade or so ago to be unimaginable heat in the UK?
Of course. In our country, annual maximum temperatures, along with annual averages, are also creeping up with each year. The footprint of climate change, already seen in storm severity and frequency, will also become clearer as the years pass, with more places having hotter days than their long-term normal would suggest and a greater number of days above 30degC.
New Zealand’s hottest day remains February 7, 1973, when the temperature reached 42.4degC in Rangiora in a nor’wester which originated in the Queensland outback. That remarkable event saw records set in many locations, with maximum temperatures between 3degC and 6degC higher than previous records.
In the past decade, we have flirted with the 40degC mark on several occasions. Waitangi Day in 2011 was especially noteworthy, with Timaru baking in 41.3degC. January 26 last year was also very hot, with Ashburton recording 39.4degC Alexandra is, unsurprisingly, Otago’s hot spot for extreme heat, with 38.7degC the maximum temperature on both January 30, 2018 and February 5, 2005.
Under our warming climate, what just happened in Britain might be the equivalent of most of Canterbury or Central Otago having temperatures above the current 42.4degC record on the same day, possibly as high as 45degC. Across the Tasman, it would be like somewhere in Australia exceeding 55degC.
If these extremes can happen in cloudy, showery, typically cool Britain, they can happen even more easily here.
