This is it - climate change is really beginning to bite

There are a lot of ill-informed opinions on here!
It's not that we've never had hot summer spells before, it's that we are now experiencing more frequent and more extreme hot spells. The data shows that. We are also having more extremes in our rainfall patterns. All these changes are as predicted by climate modelling.
@Theunamedcat why haven't we learned from the last 50 years and adapted? Because we needed to gather the data to prove global warming was real and not natural variation and to prove the link to human activity before investing the huge sums needed, PLUS the fossil fuel industry has worked tirelessly to undermine that science over much of the last 50 yrs as it did for smoking/cancer.
No we're not completely fucked - yet - and there is some amazing new technology out there but progress is too slow.
@Comedycook you'll believe it when we have 30deg at Christmas? By then we really will be royally fucked.....

Idk when ocean currents will do this, but reading a bit about it I find it more concerning than the hotter days.

And the wildfires are a new thing!

@SouthernNights59 but you need to adjust for the humidity to work out whether the heat is tolerable. And then take account of age too, because older people tolerate humid heat less.

Youare completely wrong here. It has been confirmed that some of this year's temperatures are the highest on récord, plus there freak floods occuring all over the world and food crops are suffering because the climate change

And yet another typical Brit response - there is a lot more to the world than Europe you know. My elderly parents, grandparents, and presumably the generation before that coped fine with the heat, and so do most of the elderly here. While I'm sure the heat does take its toll on the very frail elderly I've never actually heard of any who have been affected. My late DF spent his mid to late 80s living in an apartment which got extremely hot, he knew what to do to cool it down as much as possible and just got on with life - and he had a heart condition and asthma. If didn't matter how hot it was my late DM would say it was a lovely day - she hated the cold.

Bliss to you maybe. Difference is the extreme weather in other parts of the World will cause mass migration as places become uninhabitable. Irony being that the same politics in this country that is anti-immigration is also denying manmade climate change

@EscapeToSuffolk

@Buzyizzy217

I was a young mother in 1976.
It reached 35.6 in Cheltenham and 35.9 in Southampton.

The drought lasted 18 months.

There were other hot summers too but not quite as high as 76.

I remember them all well. We used to say they were proper Summers.
Year in year out.

The reason I remember '76 so well is because I had a baby son and it was a bit of a struggle keeping him cool and safe from the sun.

Its also the average temperature is rising. Not just extreme temperatures. So we apparently just had to hottest spring/june on record even though there have been hotter days. So june 76 had the hottest June day still, but this June's average was warmer.

Noones going to notice if its one degree warmer. We just see the extremes.

It wasn't sometimes even hotter in the 60s and 70s than now.

Over the past few days some parts of the UK were over 30°C.

The only time that happened in the 60s and 70s was in June 1976.

In June 2005, 2017 and 2020 it went over 30°C.

In 2022 it went over 40°C. For the first time ever.

Let’s be honest - we’re fucked. It’s irreversible and anything we do now is just either buying a little more time or mildly negating the impact. Shame, as with a bit of collective effort on the part of our leaders, it could have been different. Most of them will have shuffled off by the time this shit show gets really serious.

Our only option is to adapt, as best we can. But we aren’t even doing that because we’re led by donkeys.

I assumed this was sarcasm.

I do actually think adapting to are planning around climate change is the only option now.

That's two of us then ...

I do actually think adapting to are planning around climate change is the only option now.

But what dont get with the 'climate has always changed' response is that previous changes were much slower giving more time for species adapt and survive. They say the rapidness of this is 20 times faster than other changes. Is it that people don't believe this aspect if it, like we are underestimating how fast previous changes was or overestimating the speed of these changes?

I remember that the advice given was that in England you might just be able to grow grapes for white wine in a good year but not red wine. As for dessert grapes then forget it unless you've got a glasshouse. That's all changed.

On the other hand up to 90% of winegrowing areas in coastal and low-altitude regions of Spain, Italy, and Greece may become unsuitable for producing high-quality wine by the end of the century due to excessive drought and frequent heatwaves.

It's clear from this thread that most people really haven't got their heads around what climate catastrophe is going to look like. It will not be linear. If the ocean currents system collapses and models are predicting it to happen from next year onwards, the world will be unrecognizable. People just don't understand risk and the risk of this happening is now huge. if the same level of risk was found to be present in aviation, all flights would be grounded instantly and the industry would die because the chances of passengers reaching their destination would be almost zero. Let that sink in. The ocean currents are going to collapse. It's just a matter of when.

We're fucked. Absolutely fucked. The time for making changes was back in the 1970s. Instead we took the other path and here we are.

It was sometimes hotter in earlier decades - but it wasn't the sustained heat, and humid heat, we get now.

When it's humid, it's much harder to sweat - and if we're older we can't tolerate it. 33 degrees at 80% humidity is really dangerous.

This article from last year is really good on why humid heat is so dangerous and why we can't rely on aircon:

More than 1,300 Hajj pilgrims died this year when humidity and heat pushed past survivable limits. It’s just the start

@Petitchat there's already been a poster saying that 'old' people of 50-60 are fixed in their viewpoints. You're really not helping are you? Incidentally my mum was very much like this and I always said she had a 'read only memory'.

I was alive in 1976 too and I also had a padding pool in the early 80s but it wasn't over 30C.

In fact, I went to the Maldives in 2000 (last time I went abroad) for my honeymoon and it was 30/31 every day which was something I wasn't at all used to. Weirdly it's now only around 32C so not much change on the equator.

Correct. How long have most of us been here - 40, 50, 60-odd years? The planet is 4.6 billion years old and climate change has always been happening - without human interference. We need to learn to adapt to climate change as Richard Tice says as opposed to trying to act like King Knut Ed Milliband whose idea to reverse climate change will cost more that the £22bn Black Hole that Labour say they inherited. Better to concentrate on tackling pollution

In 1976 it was 32 degree plus.
I was there and it lasted months...

I'm actually really shocked to see so many people belittling the issue, burying their heads in the sand around it, climate change denying. It's trump-esque and I'm not sure why but I sorted of expected people to be slightly more educated on here.

We are changing how seasons work. Animals are unable to evolve or adapt quickly enough to manage these cycles so swaiths of wildlife will die. Eventually water levels will be so unpredictable/cyclic that a huge amount of land we currently use for agriculture and housing will spend weeks underwater, followed by cold, followed by droughts. We already can't make enough food, we already have issues with housing. We also have issues with water shortages which will only get worse.

The worst part is the planets reaction is upto 100 years behind what we are currently doing.

These will be the same people who think everybody should go in to the office because "it's good for mental health" ... "All WFH are slackers" ..."I bought The Sun, it said so and I can't think for myself". Because they can't see what thousands of commuters are doing to the planet.

It's so incredibly backwards I feel like these people are literally unreasonable and even when presented with facts, they just refuse to accept them. As if them not agreeing makes it so, as if this is an opinion piece.

What do you mean? It's possible to have a lovely summer with the paddling pool out everyday with a temperature in the low 20s. Google tells me that the hottest summer (defined by mean temperature over June, July and August) was 1976. The only other years from your time frame that feature in the top 15 are 1995, 1997and 1983.

That's what I said and a poster called me "moronic"

But, they didn't explain WHY it was sometimes even hotter in the 60's, 70's than now?
No one has on this thread.
Conveniently ignored....

It will play out as it plays out. Nothing we can do now. I did a Biology degree decades ago and my take home was we are fucked and it was too late then. Definitely doesn't keep me awake worrying any more. The beauty of the balance of nature and the laws of science. We like to think we are in control. We're not. All that evolution but you can't control everything.

Like when Prof Brian Cox said the sun will die and everything humans ever achieved will be lost. Yet we think we have control and every answer

Funny how climate change is not weather when its fucking freezing in June, but the minute we have a heat wave, then suddenly weather it’s important after all.