Water temperatures near UK last year were hottest on record, say scientists

The water near the UK’s coasts was hotter in 2023 than scientists have ever before recorded, a report has found, with children today experiencing a hotter and wetter climate than that in which their parents and grandparents grew up.

The sea surface temperature near coasts was 0.9C hotter and winter rainfall across the country was 24% greater over the last decade than the average from 1961 to 1990, according to the State of the UK Climate 2023 report. It found the number of “hot” (28C) days has more than doubled over that period, and the number of “very hot” (30C) and “extremely hot” (32C) days has more than tripled.

Since the UK hit 40C heat for the first time in 2022 – “absolutely smashing records” – the scientists behind the annual report started to pay more attention to extremes, said Mike Kendon, a climate scientist at the Met Office who was the lead author of the report.

The scientists found the number of “very wet” days was 20% greater in the last decade than in the 1961-1990 period.

The mass burning of coal, oil and gas since the 1850s – together with the boom in livestock farming and heavy industry – has heated the planet by 1.3C and upended weather patterns that used to vary only naturally. The report found human activity had made the UK’s unusually high average temperature last year 150 times more likely.

Still, projections show that “2023 will be a fairly average year by the middle of the century and a fairly cool year by the end of the century,” said Kendon. “It’s a really dramatic indicator that our climate will be pushed out of the envelope of the historical range.”

The UK, which has pumped more planet-heating gas into the atmosphere than all but a handful of countries, according to an analysis from Carbon Brief – is already suffering from increasingly violent weather that scientists have traced back to the breakdown of a stable climate. An analysis in May found that a spell of “never-ending” rain in the UK and Ireland last autumn and winter was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by global heating.

According to the new report, 2023 was the UK’s seventh-wettest year in a dataset that stretches back to 1836. Six years in the last decade were in the top ten hottest years in a dataset of near-coast sea surface temperatures that stretches back to 1870.

Large parts of the planet are suffering through scorching heat and scientists from Copernicus on Sunday logged what may be the world’s hottest day in a dataset that goes back to the 1940s. Across Europe, weeks of unrelenting heat have fuelled wildfires, strained power grids and caused deaths.

“I don’t look at those European temperatures with envy,” said Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society. “We all dream of warm sunny days – but that’s warm, not exceptionally hot.”

Kendon said the findings were worrying but that what comes next is “not a done deal”.

“I think about the state of the planet, and I look at my own children growing up, and I think about the world they are going to be adults in and [in which they] have to manage and cope with all the challenges,” he said. “It’s obviously very important that whoever is making decisions about policy are informed by the best available science. That’s what motivates me to come to work every single day.”