dorlomin

Conningby in Lincolnshire sets the UK record The previous was 38.7C so I think that is 1.6C hotter. That is pretty intense. (edited small chance of a 17:00 temperature beating that one) Edited. A temperature record is usually set where a local station has a freaking combination of local weather factors that mean it is a few tenths of a degree warmer than the other and sets the record. That this heat wave had so many sites above that record shows this is a pretty serious outlier in terms of the over all heat in the country. Combine with Coningsby utterly smashing the previous record with the number of sites breaking that record show this really was a freakish event.

Well it will keep them quiet and happy for a bit.

12:00 temperatures. Another couple of stations come within 0.1C of the previous record.

From the met office. I thought around 3PM we would see places approach the record. That said Surrey will cloud over later today and so will perhaps not be the hottest places in the UK. But here we are, smashing records in the a.m.

f**k. f**k.

BBC live blog. This makes it one of the hottest days ever recorded in the UK (perhaps top 5 but bit busy to check) at 11 am.

https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-weather-britain-idUSS8N1W802O Its announced provisionally on the day. They do some further checks before entering the record books.

32C recorded at several locations at 9am. It's all but guaranteed today will be one of the hottest days ever recorded in the UK. Personally I would be surprised if we do not break the 38.7C all time record set 3 years ago. While there is some moaning about the tone of the news reports, today is a day when people who are vulnerable and in poorly ventilated rooms, houses etc are at real risk of hospitalisation and death. Heat waves are the deadliest extreme weather events we get in modern Britain.

Now we wait for this evenings data. Normally we would expect the south eastern counties to be the warmest but there is some cloud for them, so this is why its the Cambs\ east midlands region that will be the most cloudless so the most likely to crack a record.

Over night models seem to think some places might break 40C today, especially around Cambridge and the East Midlands. Very dry ground and warm air in the morning to start, with very clear skies. Tonight will be much cooler than last night. Rain in places tomorrow. So some cooling. By 3pmish we should have a clear idea how likely a record will be. By half 5 all the 4pm results that come in automatically will have been collated and we will know the provisional figures. Yesterday was the third hottest day ever recorded at 38.1C Possibly last night was the warmest night in UK but not seen any official data yet. Suns up so everywhere will now be warming. For the curious, Scotland's record is 32.9C in August 2003.

Going to be a warm night for many. 27C at 3 in the morning for some places.

There is a small chance that somewhere will top that at 17:00 but still it means that we are close to the highest ever temperature recorded in the UK (38.7C) with tomorrow likely to be the warmer day. More worrying tonight may have lows of 24C. This will mean people will struggle to cool over night. UK houses are really not made for this so many will have rooms with much higher temperatures. This is not a huge deal as this is a short burst of heat. But when you get these high lows over extended periods it leads to. a big jump in deaths in the elderly. This can be mitigated as these temperatures are more normal elsewhere but these countries tend to design houses to cool not to retain heat over night, but that will take time and work. The impact on transport, work, schools etc certainly justifies a high warning level. Its the point of introducing these coloured warnings so that people whos role it is to plan for disruption such as managers, head teachers, civil administrators can be alerted to a high risk event. We get this when high warnings for floods, wind or something comes in. IIRC we had a red for wind in February?

Multiple methods are used. But the best we have is oxygen isotopes in ice sheets. Oxygen has two stable isotopes O16 and O18. The warmer the ocean that water comes from the higher the ratio of O18 to O16 in ice cores. A similar method using carbon isotopes is used for deep dwelling shell forming creatures. There are many more. But those tend to be the gold standards. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_OxygenBalance

Kew! Its hot in here.

From Marcott 2013 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1228026 Longish story but our climate has been dominated by orbital cycles over the past 3 million years. This is due to our CO2 being so low vs historic norms. This made us very sensitive to small changes. So we built major ice sheets over both polls. Small changes in orbit change the energy at high northern latitude and pushed us in and out of glacials (what everyone thinks of as ice ages). About 11 000 years ago the Earth was in northern hemisphere summer when closest to the Sun, this is what pushed us out of the last glacial. But over those 11000 years we now have our norther hemisphere summer when furthest from the Sun. This caused a long term cooling that we see in Marcott 2013. That cooling would allow snows to last longer in the high hills, so cooling springs and reinforcing etc. This is the long term causes of the glacial interglacial phases we see. Our release of CO2 since the mid 1800 has seen that trend reverse. Other forcings obviously work. Over the longer time frames the Sun heating up is the dominant climate forcing. https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/14/3/pdf/i1052-5173-14-3-4.pdf (astrophysics nerds, as it burns hydrogen into helium, the helium is much more dense so the core gets denser and burns faster). Royer 2004 compares the slow warming of the Sun with the CO2 feedback to show that CO2 and the Sun explain most of the long term changes. tldnr, human CO2 has disrupted long term cycles.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf We have broad estimates of the natural forcings over the past 120 years. There is no change to a major component of the system that can explain the changes we have seen other than CO2. https://www.nature.com/articles/35066553

We get a warm mass of air coming up off the Sahara as in this week, or back in 2019 when we had a sustained high pressure over the UK for a couple of weeks, the maximum temperatures are made (on average) higher than when such weather phenomena happened before. The physics is simple, more CO2 means more IR coming back to the surface. This then in turn means more water vapor can be held in the atmosphere which also increases the greenhouse effect acting as a feedback. There is a lot more to the science, but on the whole what had been predicted back in the 70s and 80s is broadly happening. This is a bit repeating the basics. But it seems the basics are back under discussion again. Edited on the left is the incoming short wave radiation, that hits the ground warming it up. That the emits infrared (long wave radiation). That then gets trapped in the atmosphere and some returned to the ground, that extra bit is in very basic terms the greenhouse effect. The more greenhouse gasses the more infrared comes back and warms the surface.

Declining birth rates have been a phenomena for over a century. statista.com/statistics/1037268/crude-birth-rate-uk-1800-2020/ It is seen in every society that has urbanised. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-UN?tab=chart&time=1950..latest https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate Pronatal policies have rarely if ever worked, countries with the best proviosion for mothers in the world such as Finland and Norway have very low birth rates. Its a much bigger issue in Japan and China. Couple of years ago I tried to start a discussion on how much the 2020s was going to be shaped by demographics, climate and energy but sort of gave up as no one really cares. But China may see its population drop by half towards the end of the century. ROK, Taiwan and other advanced east Asian nations are in similar boats. Russia is another that is on the way out. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Russia/Fertility_rate/ They had a mini boom in the 2010s as the 80s boom "echoed" that is there were more women of child birthing age. They are now headed towards their mid 40s and the big collapse of the 1990s is now hitting peak birthing age. Again very long term issues at play. East Europe, including the prosperous EU countries is again, worse than the UK. There are a lot of factors at work. Educated women tend to not want to get pregnant so literacy among women is the strongest indicator of a coming major drop in fertility. Urban living is expensive but you get a lot out of investing heavily in 2 or 3 children and their education rather than across 6-10 when you have mid level incomes (globally your sort of $15k a year type range). In more to most developed nations, carrying a child is hard work and painful.. Its expensive and time consuming, it takes away from your career and your leisure time. Every political group on the right and left will tell you "the things I want in society will fix this" so less feminism, gays, social spending on the right, more feminism, gays, trans and social spending on the left. On the whole if its not some one who spends a life studying the problem, they are probably full of shit what ever their solutions. In the broadest of strokes, this is just a long term thing we have known about for decades (hence the "pensions crisis as there will be too few workers compared with pensioners), to the UK specific, well for the most part we do not stand out from more conservative or more socially liberal countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#/media/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_Map_by_Country.svg It mostly that well of women do not really want to have children the world over.

It is part of one of the mission goals, exoplanet spectroscopy. Infrared is almost impossible to see from the surface of the Earth as our atmosphere has gasses that capture and emit it, these are the greenhouse gasses like H2O, CO2 and methane. Infrared astronomy is either done from an aircraft (SOFIA) or satellites. Webb will be able to see into those wavelengths and in much greater detail than any previous IR telescope. Webb can pick up the same gasses that make it difficult to see from Earth on other planets, one of the first images was a spectroscope of a planet with water vapour in its atmosphere. So this can be used to select targets of planets that may have climates close to Earths. Its unlikely we will see a planet and know it has life, but it will help build clues and give us targets for closer looks. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-reveals-steamy-atmosphere-of-distant-planet-in-detail/

NASA targetting late August for its uncrewed flight round the Moon with its new lunar rocket, the SLS https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/2022/07/15/progress-continues-toward-artemis-i-launch/ They ran a successful dress rehearsal in mid June but I was expecting early next year for the first uncrewed flight. To be followed by Artemis II a crewed flight round the Moon and then Artemis III a lunar landing. But that needs Starship HLS to be up and running. So that is pencilled in for 2024, though 2026 might be more realistic.