8:45am Wednesday 8th July 2009
By Keith Thomson
I hope that many of you reading this will be alive in 2050 to check whether the UK Climate Projections, just announced by the Met Office, are close to the weather that you experience.
I suspect that you will be frustrated by how perceptive the scientists were forty years earlier, and annoyed that little was done politically to slow down the changes.
This is the fifth set of future climate projections made by the Met Office and they give three sets of figures, a low, a median and a high estimate, for the years 2020, 2050 and 2080. The set of figures most likely to be accurate is the median group.
In making the estimates, they have taken into account changes in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere due to increased plant growth, and the warming of the oceans, as well as sunspot cycles and the occasional volcanic outburst. They haven’t included the potential increase in methane from warming frozen ground or the complete disappearance of summer ice in the Arctic.
So they expect Yorkshire and Humberside to get warmer, with the winter average up a little more than 2degC, and summers being more than two degrees higher, though less than four. There will be fewer air frost days, continuing the 30 day decline since the 1960s.
The rainfall totals are unlikely to change very much but there will be more of it in winter, and up to a fifth less in summer.
The really noticeable feature will be the increase in sudden downpours and torrential rain with all the implications for damage and flash flooding, continuing the pattern of the last few years.
These changes don’t seem to be much of a threat, but the reality is a considerable change to plant growth, more insect pests, water shortages, drought, floods and moorland and woodland fires. Elderly deaths from heat stress will increase more rapidly than the decline in those from hypothermia.
We may well be able to adapt to most of these changes, though many elsewhere in the world won’t have the choice. Nor will some of those who live on Yorkshire’s coast, as by then the North Sea will have risen by at least 18cm (7in), and flood defences will be a priority.
The Met Office’s high range of figures don’t bear thinking about.
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