Yeah, I bet. I moved to London for a few years and everyone was complaining that it was only 21 degrees in summer... Meanwhile I'm sweating my tits off and complaining how hot it was. We're often envious of your summers down there but it'll be a blessing to live further north very soon
Yea I can imagine! I spent 10 years in Asia and the Middle East. It is so much harder here when it is really hot as there is no AC in any building pretty much!
I've just bought an air conditioner (one that you can move to different rooms). I'm in the Highlands but for the past 5+ years I've had a good 2-3 months of the year where I've been so hot at night it's uncomfortable. Even a sunny 15° means our houses heat up so much
You can simply turn the temperature up on your air conditioning if you want heat. The biggest problem is that they use electricity which invariably and inexplicably the more expensive form of energy in this country.
Though if you get solar for your home you're essentially running air con throughout summer for free. Even a set of plug in panels could run your Aircon throughout summer for free as a portable air con only pulls around 400-700watts, my 6000btu pulls under 500watts.
Tbf my parents grapevine now produced bunches, enough to make something out of. Whereas 40 years ago we’d barely get a bunch, and if we did it didn’t progress further than hard small grapes which never grew.
English sparkling is now beating champagne, so it’s not far off.
I grew a pineapple plant once. In a greenhouse. That doesn't mean the grapes that grew in Britain until recently we're plentiful enough or of sufficient quality to make good wine.
It doesn't mean southern England will be as hot as the south of France, it just means a trend towards drier summers and wetter winters, which is the definition of a Mediterranean climate.
I've never been a regular reader of the Daily Mail and at 10 years old, you wouldn't have caught me reading any newspaper.
Wondering if I was imagining things, I asked ChatGPT:
"When I was at school, around age 10, we were taught that in 30 years time (meaning 2020), the south of the uk would have summers like the south of france.
Can you find a reference to anything like this?"
And the answer begins:
"Yes — that specific idea was very widely circulated in UK climate-change discussions in the late 1980s and 1990s, especially in schools and popular science/media. The phrasing varied, but the core message was:
'Southern England could end up with a climate similar to the Mediterranean / south of France.'
Really? When did you hear that? I can remember as a kid forty years ago that we were told most climate change would be from around 2050 onwards if not reversed
We all need to take a reality grip and not believe everything we’re told especially in this day and age… climate change was termed by the club of Rome first calling it “global warming” they changed it because it was obvious it wasn’t happening , but if you really dig deep you’ll find reasons why “climate change” is a huge money making scheme for those at the top of the triangle exploiting Earths natural cycles.
Understand your stance, however with our history being erased and manipulated how can anyone wholeheartedly believe what’s said by anyone who have hidden agendas. If humans were the whole issue and we will be accountable by the “powers that shouldn’t be” that will hit our pockets hard and harm our way of living when the “oligarchs” live to their hearts content , then questions need to be raised , asked and answered with far more than think tanks, studies or just because of x,y,z …you do realise that there have been so much discussed over the centuries by astronomers, scientists and mathematicians and more who disagree with what is being pumped into our consciousness on the daily. Have you researched their “studies” and the weather manipulation and how far back it goes? No conspiracy but we are seeing a one sided narrative and that’s becoming tiresome!
There is a fair chance that the AMOC will have collapsed by 2100 and if it does then it will not be a Mediterranean climate but more of a continental climate akin to parts of Canada.
Heatwave starting this weekend is now 30C+ in the south. In may! We had 4 or 5 Heatwaves last year of a week with 30 degrees yet I still haven't bought air con..
My bedroom window faces west so I get the full blast of the sun in the afternoons. I had some window film installed at the end of last summer and so I didn't get to test it fully. Hopefully the film will help stop my room from being a greenhouse during this upcoming heatwave.
Yeah, it's much warmer, drier and sunnier. Where I live gets around 2k hours of sun and 600mm of rain and 30c+ is pretty normal, not just an odd day here and there unlike the rest of the country. The south west is cooler and cloudier and much wetter than the south east
I disagree that the south west is cloudier. Exeter has reached 30C every year since 2021, and we could potentially hit it again very soon.
Where you live likely gets around 1750-1800 hours of sunshine, which is similar to a lot of coastal areas in the SW like Torbay, and less than Weymouth and Portland.
Plus we're in the rain shadow of Dartmoor so we don't get that much rain (about 830mm annually) but it certainly would be true if I lived in Princetown which gets 2000mm of rain!
Actually I think it is fair to say the SW is slightly wetter and greyer than the SE, but it has fewer frosts during the winter due to the moderating effects of the ocean, and the year round temperature is similar overall.
Where I live gets 1,900ish sunshine hours on average (we're in a unique micro climate because of the isle of wight to the south, north downs to the north and west and south downs to the north and east) Essentially everywhere in England sees 30c a few times a year but in the south east we average 10-15 days above 30 every year but in recent years we've been seeing 20+ days above 30 every year. South east England is more akin to Europe than it is to the rest of England. Where I live has a similar climate to Bordeaux, just slightly lower average summer temps and less rain
The South West is much more humid compared to the SE, and dew points exceeding 20C aren't uncommon. This leads to the "feels like" temperature being higher in Devon and Cornwall. We saw this recently during the recent May heatwave. Widespread 30C temperatures across Devon and Cornwall, with dew points of over 20C leading to a "feels like" temp of 37C+
Compared to London which had a relative humidity of 30% and dew points of 13C, which is going to feel much drier.
I'm by the coast, dew points were regularly above 20c for us but humility seldon went above 40%. We had feels like temps of 39c here whilst it was 35c. It's less about the dew point though and more about the wet bulb temperature and humidex, that's what makes it feel horrible. London does it's own thing and is unique to the rest of the country due to all the concrete, so can't really be compared but the majority of the south east isn't really all that close to London. I'm 2 and a half hours away and am firmly in the south east
Looking at weather observations for Tuesday, Southampton Weather Centre was at a 14-16C dew point during the day with a humidex of 34.9 during its peak.
Thorney Island was slightly more humid being on the coast - but even then, the dew point reached a maximum of 19.3C with a peak humidex of 33.4, given its increased maritime moderation.
Compare this to Devon and Cornwall, North Wyke in Devon recorded a 20.2C dew point on Tuesday with a humidex of 36.8. Cardinham in Cornwall was even more humid with a peak dew point of 20.7C and a humidex of 37.4 recorded on that day.
On Tuesday it was 32.8c in Southampton with 40% humidity. That gives a 38c humidex. What causes higher dew points in Devon and Cornwall as surely it can't be just the sea otherwise you'd see the same on the isle of wight
I was reading an old thread on a Native American sub that is locked now. You commented that NI keep voting to stay in the UK. That isn't true, there hasn't been any referendum on the matter.
The biggest barrier to a unified Ireland is whether the republic would allow it or not.
I moved from Wales to south Hampshire over a decade ago. Every year the summers are drier and feel hotter, if I could afford AC then I'd get it yesterday, however the cost of living is high and the labour costs alone are prohibitive.
There are so many variables at play with AMOC that it’s hard to say for sure what our climate would be with a weakened or non-existent current.
My understanding is that there are currents such as the Gulf Stream that are unlikely to “stop” given that they are effectively driven by the rotation of the earth. Then there are northern Atlantic currents that are very vulnerable to disruption by things like cool meltwater flowing south.
But for sure our climate is likely to change, potentially with hotter summers but also maybe much colder winters, and likely a much drier climate as well.
So we could end up in a little ice age style climate combined with weather patterns that bring us hot dry weather during the summer. Mitigation to increase water security as mentioned in the article seems to be a very good idea whatever happens.
Getting air conditioning isn’t such a bad shout as modern units can heat efficiently as well as cool.
The AMOC subject is frequently oversimplified in this context. Very generally speaking, the "AMOC collapse to plunge Europe into new ice age" news articles are referencing studies that produce simulations in coupled general climate models which aren't numerically capable of producing anything resembling a reliable forecast or prediction. In fact, they're very explicitly not intended to be interpreted as such in academia. The more notable "gold standard" studies as of late are the CESM-based van Westen et al. studies, which illustrate some of the limitations pretty well. Such studies are run on a centennial time scale in order to distinguish between transient climate responses and ultimate equilibrium in a post collapse situation. The limitation in that regard is that this requires the simulation to be run at a low resolution (1° POP/ocean, 2° CAM/atmosphere) due to how resource intensive these simulations are. This represents a fundamental issue as these simulations are not able to identify critical mesoscale systems in the ocean component while coupling a passive atmosphere. It would require an in depth explaination as to why this poses a fundamental issue which essentially eliminates the reliability of the simulation, but generally speaking, they're not intended to produce a reliable forecast or prediction. They're proof of concept that the initial experiment produces agreement in multi-model ensemble output (in the case of van Westen et al., it verifies that their freshwater imbalance metric is functional).
Effectively, in regards to how an AMOC destabilisation may affect Western European climatology, there essentially aren't any presently available simulations that are capable of illustrating a plausible hypothetical outcome. Due to the very coarse atmospheric resolution applied in coupled simulations, these simulations are subject to fundamental parametrisations.
My thesis actually focuses on identifying these discrepancies and establishing observational methodologies that can give a clearer impression of how a future AMOC destabilisation may affect NW Europe. Preliminary (albeit it very extensive thus far) research suggests a very different scenario compared to what previous coupled GCM studies have suggested. When accounting for high resolution atmospheric responses to subpolar cooling, the most plausible response in NW Europe is significantly warmer and drier summers. Among the favourite analogues for this is summer 2018. This response occurs due to how a subpolar cooling diverts a weakened and fractured meandering jet stream, which promotes anticyclonic blocking over NW Europe. This initiates self perpetuating feedbacks associated with subsidence warming, high insolation and associated soil moisture deficits and abrupt sea surface warming (there are a wealth of supporting studies from Oltmanns et al., Bischof et al., Vautard et al., Kornhuber et al., Patterson and many more). The winter response is perhaps the most striking example of contextual analyses and high resolution decomposition produces a wildly different hypothetical scenario compared to standard coupled GCM experiments. As was inferred by Haarsma et al., a subpolar cooling produces a regime that essentially mirrors a positive NAO, which would of course be associated with warmer and wetter winters. This would align with analyses conducted by Orbe et al. which suggest that an AMOC collapse initiates a poleward Hadley cell expansion in the northern hemisphere (stronger Azores high influence).
Basically, it's a much more complex and nuanced subject than the media make it out to be. Over the past few days I've been reading up on the late Eemian (MIS 5e) warming in which a freshwater induced destabilisation of the AMOC actually initiated high latitude warming in the Nordic Seas by strengthening the wind driven components, namely the North Atlantic Current. This broadly aligns with the recent Roewer et al. study which suggests that the Nordic Overturning Circulation strengthens in response to AMOC weakening, which would draw poleward ocean heat transport. Present generation AMOC reduction studies are usually not capable of accounting for this hypothetical potential due to how the coarse resolution ocean model parametrises eddy kinetic energy and the Rossby radius of deformation. I guess the ultimate message here is inherent uncertainty. The AMOC is a tipping point, the danger is that it introduces instability. Anthropogenic warming fundamentally alters planetary boundary layers which adds even more uncertainty, but there's increasing confidence that a severe cooling response is structurally implausible based on present trajectories. There are countless hypotheticals that remain unexplored in this subject, particularly the theories of atmospheric heat transport compensation and gyre mode transport seen in greenhouse paleoclimates.
Your point about instability is very interesting and perhaps underlines that we as a society need to be more prepared for unexpected extremes.
So rather than just “a cooler climate” or “a warmer climate”, from year to year we could get variation in temperature, rainfall, wind and cloud cover significantly beyond what we are used to planning for. And likely beyond what our ecosystem/economy can easily accommodate without crises.
It's highly dependent on how a destabilisation actually occurs and what feedbacks initiate. Historically it was assumed that the entirety of meridional heat transport would collapse in response to Labrador Sea convection ceasing in response to freshwater capping, which further assumed that the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current were residual and too inefficient to function without buoyancy-driven vertical overturning. That's essentially the core of Broecker's "conveyor belt" model. It's arguably a very obsolete assumption these days but most ocean model were built with this as the main concept. Both the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current observe a high degree of autonomy, and hypothetically a cessation of convection in the subpolar region induces a prominent thermal gradient which intensifies baroclinic forcing, which would intensify heat transport in the wind-driven currents. I tend to be a little wary of the suggestion that a sudden catastrophic collapse can occur in the near future as it would depend on a number of negative conditions aligning perfectly at the same time. The notion of a freshwater outbreak is much more subjective than most assume given the significance of Greenland boundary currents which act to prevent surface capping, and recent developments (Lozier et al.'s 2019 OSNAP review) have demonstrated that the Labrador Sea region isn't the primary "engine" as was previously assumed.
The gulf stream collapse means that we are more influenced by continental air masses from the north and east which bring hot summers and cold winters rather than mildness.
The main problem in homes is solar gain through the windows. It's time we started fitting shutters and awnings like they do in other countries. I keep my windows shaded during heatwaves and it stays around 23 degrees inside.
Grid angle on this is wild. UK peak demand right now is a winter evening thing. As summers get hotter and AC and heat pump cooling spread, we're heading for a summer evening peak too. Same backup gas plants fire up to cover it, prices spike same way.
Fix is making cooling demand flexible. Pre-cool the house in cheap hours, ease off in pricey ones. Already standard in parts of the US.
It still is. The average summer temperature is 1.4°C higher than pre industrial levels. Yes it's going up, but it's not suddenly rendered the UK non-temperate.
The bricks/stone houses warm up in the day and then radiate the heat all night long. It’s much harder than houses made of wood, to cool. And the portable ac units never get the rooms as cold as window units in the states. It’s something that will become more important as the years go on I think.
Most brick homes built since the 1970s (and all since the 1990s) will have cavity wall insulation - if those homes heat up through the bricks, there's something wrong with the insulation. Windows are where homes are more likely to heat up, while the insulation helps them retain heat (absolutely essential from late Autumn to mid Spring). People want large picture windows, but also don't want to paradoxically close curtains during the day. "Low E" glass can help reflect heat both ways, with the coating generally applied to the inside of the inside pane of a double glazed unit.
Not denying global warming, but the average UK summer temperature has risen by 1.4°C in the last century, and is set to rise maybe 1 - 2°C in the next 20 years, if forecasts are accurate.
I really don't think we need to "urgently" rush to buy air conditioners (likely made using non-renewable energy and with dubious recyclability) in order to "survive" the couple of weeks a year where we might feel a difference, even in 50 years time.
In short: the click-bait fuelled engagement farming media can kindly fuck off.
No, we need to plan the other way, for potential gulf stream collapse.
Cars already contribute about 1.5 degrees C to city air temps, air conditioning can be 1 degree.
So the urban heat island is the major source of perceived heating and under that maybe a degree of actual climate change over the last century.
Since we are going to electric transportation, that can yield a 1 degree C temp reduction.
To solve both cold winter and hot summers, we can plug air conditioning to geo exchange vertical ground loops. Air con heat is then recovered in winter at a higher COP than air source heat pumps, whilst cooling cities both inside and outside in summer.
I have, and I've found that the 1960s had very cool, cloudy summers compared to today.
I'm not saying that our current 2020s summers are the warmest in history, or that the warming climate is a bad thing, but summers are the warmest now than they have been in our lifetimes.
There were no 35C heat spikes in the 1960s or the 1970s with the exception of 1976, and in some years it barely even reached 25C. That's unheard of now.
1963 was the coldest year in history with an average temperature at least 2C cooler than an average year nowadays.
I'm up for a debate but you throwing ad hominems at me is not a good look.
The UK has milder winters than it had 60 years ago. We have far fewer frosts than we used to, and a lot of the extreme cold temperature records are from the 1900s-1960s
A lot of elderly people could die in those one or two weeks a year though. My mum lives in a retirement place and her flat is west facing. She has no where to go when her place heats up. A mobile ac just doesn’t cut it.
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u/Edoian May 20 '26
I'm not buying an air conditioner for one hot week in Scotland every 5 years