Chris Parker

Third heatwave of the summer and it is only the start of July!

Met Office weather map showing maximum temperatures across the UK and Ireland for Thursday. Temperatures range from 16°C in northern Scotland to 30°C in central England, with most regions in the mid to high 20s

Met Office weather map showing maximum temperatures across the UK for Friday. Temperatures range from 18°C in northern Scotland to 31°C near Cardiff, with most areas in Wales and central England in the high 20s

Met Office weather map showing maximum temperatures across the UK and parts of Europe for Saturday. Temperatures range from 20°C in northern Scotland to 32°C in central-southern England, with much of the UK in the mid to high 20s

Met Office weather map showing maximum temperatures across the UK and parts of Europe for Sunday. Temperatures range from 18°C in northern Scotland to 31°C in southern England, with most regions in the mid to high 20s.

🌡️ Heat is building across the UK this week, temperatures could reach 32-33°C during the weekend 👇

The UK hasn't experienced a severe drought since the '90s or an extreme one since the '70s. This has led to complacency in drought preparedness. With climate change, future droughts could be worse than anything previously experienced.

High warming rate fuels record-breaking weather

The longer our measurements, the fewer record-breaking events we should observe.

The opposite is the case - many more records and higher record margins

I summarise the key takeaways of our ‪@natrevearthenviron.nature.com article in a guest post.

New paper in ERL! We study the importance of resolution for the representation of climate extremes.

We use a new generation of km-scale models to show that many important details about temperature and precipitation extremes are hidden at CMIP6-like resolutions.

doi.org/10.1088/1748...

Found the quote, thanks. It references this paper using the median of the UN gap report scenario set to define future rates if warning. Having looked at that dataset the median won't include uncertainties in aerosol forcing or ECS.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Did you share the wrong paper? I couldn't find the quote and the paper doesn't look at global climate models.

I agree the place to look is a comparison between observed and modelled ocean heat content. Struggled to find recent work on this but I assume it exists.

If the recent surface temperature warming is broadly inline with model projections but the models don't project the large change in energy imbalance does that not suggest the climate model sensitivity is too high? Or that sensitivity estimates based on surface temperatures is the wrong metric?

Graph showing the ranking for monthly global mean temperature from six data sets between March 2023 and June 2024. Rankings are shown as coloured squares. Red is warmest on record (for that month and dataset), orange is second warmest, deep yellow (a beautiful shade that I want to call cadmium yellow but it's not toxic) means a top five month and pale yellow (the colour of sun faded straw) is top ten. Nothing is outside that range. Every single warmest month in all datasets happened since July 2023.

Updated updated notes on the recent acceleration in the argument about the recent acceleration in warming which may or may not be happening or may only appear to be happening (or not, you idiot). Either way it appeared in the New York Times.

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2025/02/16/a...

Thanks, John! I really appreciate these summaries. I expect moderate acceleration from increasing forcing, but also a wider range of internal variability as the climate warms - making 23/24 tricky to unpack.

⚠️Global warming caused by humans is advancing at 0.27°C per decade – the highest rate since records began.

This is one of the indicators updated every year by over 60 international scientists in the annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report – published today. doi.org/10.5194/essd... /1

New infrastructure should be climate resilient from the Inception. HS2 and Sizewell are reasonable examples for flood risk. There are embedded processes that are starting to address this but they are often superficial and don't go far enough. Certainly more needs to be done.

evidence suggests it does little to manage large floods in big catchments. We need a combination of engineered and natural solutions thinking holistically at catchment scales. Unfortunately flooding is extremely complex - every catchment and every flood event is different with no simple solutions.

There is a strict requirement that government funded flood schemes must not increase risks elsewhere. This is generally done by making space for water and providing large storage areas. Yes, natural flood management and upland reforestation is important to provide resilience but

England & Wales Fire Severity Index maps Map showing red blotches (exceptional risk) across the Midlands - from London heading up to Doncaster. Most of the rest of England is orange (very high risk).

Natural England produce a Fire Severity Index (FSI) but this needs to be promoted more widely across the media.

FSI models potential fire severity *should they occur*, and rises widely across England to *exceptional* levels by next Monday.

Observed trend in Earth energy imbalance may provide a constraint for low climate sensitivity models Climate models that give a low warming from increases in greenhouse gases do not match satellite measurements. Future warming will likely be worse than thought

A pdf of the paper is now available here: cicero.oslo.no/en/articles/...

Finally! I would like to think my relentless nagging was the gentle nudge that made this happen.

Observed trend in Earth energy imbalance may provide a constraint for low climate sensitivity models Climate forcings by greenhouse gases and aerosols cause an imbalance at the top of the atmosphere between the net incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation from Earth. This Earth energy...

Happy to share our paper in ‪@science.org‬ 'Observed trend in Earth energy imbalance may provide a constraint for low climate sensitivity models' | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Internal variability effect doped by climate change drove the 2023 marine heat extreme in the North Atlantic Communications Earth & Environment - The 2023 North Atlantic marine heatwave was driven by an extreme phase of internal atmospheric variability but would have been impossible without the doping...

🌊 The N.Atlantic has been experiencing extreme T°C in 2023. This situation raises a number of questions: Have we missed something? Do climate models allow us to understand such an event, or have we entered a new climate regime?
We attempted to answer these questions in this study:
rdcu.be/eh0e8
1/14

Resiting the temptation to engage in an RCP8.5 debate.

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published here https://doi.org/10.5281/zen...

The preprint for Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024 is now up for public discussion in ESSD.

essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es...

This is great! And yes we should f***ing swear more about how we are still neither reducing global emissions to meet agreed targets nor adapting to increasing extreme weather already now happening

So sorry Zack. I really value your excellent and insightful work.

UK weather: Spring may become driest on record with no rain in sight There has been a lack of rainfall in many parts of the UK so far this spring and there is little or no rain in the immediate forecast.

This Spring (March-April-May) may end up being the driest on record for the UK.

This would also make it the driest of any season in a dataset that goes back to 1836.

Spring in 1852 currently holds the record for driest season at 100.7 mm averaged across the UK.

www.bbc.co.uk/weather/arti...

​​​​The country is not prepared for climate impacts, say advisors​ - Climate Change Committee There is now unequivocal evidence that climate change is making extreme weather in the UK more likely and…

Climate impacts will worsen - it is a question of whether they are terrible, really bad or just bad. It is a no brainer to scale up investment in adaptation. This will save money and spur economic activity. Climate resilience is a competitive advantage. www.theccc.org.uk/2025/04/30/t...

And shattered the monthly record by 3.7°C!
bsky.app/profile/mika...

Daily record in Helsinki (±3days) shattered by more than 5°C! Reminder, record shattering events will occur with increasing frequency and severity in a warming climate.

Mika, do you know what the March monthly record is?

@selmaguerreiro.bsky.social we really need to finish writing that paper on record breaking extremes.

Looking for a new postdoc position in climate?

Help us build a reanalysis-based storyline approach to consider how individual extreme events and their impacts are altered in different climates.

Based in Edinburgh as part of collaborative project:
elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...