There was a graphic on BBC News this week that compared a fictional weather forecast from the Met Office for July 2050 which was made about 10 years ago, to the actual forecast from the Met Office for July 2022, and the results are horrifying. London has for the first time this week experienced 40°C temperatures; not only once but repeatedly this week.
The United Kingdom being upwards of 50° north of the equator, has housing and infrastructure dating back at least 200 years in some parts and is simply not designed, not merely to cope with this, but even if this was a possibility. To put this in perspective, I have a Philips School Atlas at home which was published in 1980. It has yearly temperature range charts for Europe and the UK and for London, the average daily maximum is stated as being 17°C.
The Met Office said that the projected figures showed what Britain "can expect to experience by summer 2050 under a high emissions scenario; showing that "some physical changes in the climate we can expect and how they might impact business and industry". Summer 2050 appears to have arrived 26 years too early.
Speaking as an Australian Australian there is a temptation to go "Hurr, hurr, hurr!" and deride the British as being a load of softies but if your whole built environment is designed for something which is 30°C cooler than what you are experiencing, then that's deeply unpleasant. I was in Sheffield in 2003 when it got to 41°C but that was only one day and a freak occurrence at that. Britain and Europe which are 50°N compared with 36°S where I live in Sydney, should not expect this as normal. Sure, like mad dogs and Englishmen we do play cricket in the midday sun but as Australian Australians we live in a nation which expects droughts and floods, upon this prison island which was hidden in the summer for a million years. Normal in Australia is not normal in England.
We as people live at the bottom of a vast ocean. That ocean is mostly made of nitrogen gas, mixed in with oxygen and a bunch of other reasonably inert gases. This ocean goes through yearly warming and cooling cycles, as the earth which is tilted at 23° rolls around on its rotationally locked dance around the sun which is eight light minutes away. That giant miasma of incandescent plasma heats up each pole of rotation for roughly half of the time; which is how we experience seasons.
If the earth was simply a theoretical white body, it would be warm to the touch on the hot side facing the sun and freezing on the cold dark side facing away from it. If the earth was simply a theoretical black body, it would be warm to the touch on the hot side facing the sun and then radiate the heat it just acquired on the cold dark side facing away from it.
The earth though is neither a theoretical white body or a theoretical black body but a small blue rocky marble thing, which is covered in one ocean of liquid ash and a another ocean of gaseous soup. These two oceans retain roughly 15°C of heat, such that the dark side doesn't immediately freeze every night. A Swedish scientist called Svante Arrhenius wanted a better explanation for this and so in 1896, performed a bunch of experiments and then generalised the results to the earth as a whole, then wrote a paper called "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground". What this basically says is that our ocean of gaseous soup acts a bit like a greenhouse on a cold day and retains the heat inside it. That's really useful if you don't want all of your plants to die.
https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
In the world of 1898, we we busily liberating loads and loads of Carbonic Acid (otherwise known as Carbon Dioxide) into the ocean of gaseous soup which we live at the bottom of, by burning loads and loads of coal and oil and doing lovely chemistry in turning solids into gases. It was a revolution! Not only did we discover that burning loads and loads of coal and oil and doing lovely chemistry in turning solids into gases was useful for boiling water to turn into steam for steam engines which were running factories making all kinds of neat stuff, but then we discovered that we could burn those same things to boil water in giant kettles to make electricity to run factories making all kinds of neat stuff, and then the electricity to power all the neat stuff we made which we put in our houses. Then we discovered that if you burnt oil products that you could use that in engines to make cars and trucks and planes and boats go really fast. Then we discovered that by doing more lovely chemistry that we could turn the oil itself into the raw materials to make more neat stuff we made which we put in our houses.
Fun times, yeah? That's totally going to go on forever. 500 years of burning stuff and then knocking down the trees is going to do nothing, right? So long as we keep on making neat stuff, then a few very rich people or very lucky people to do science get to become even more rich and lucky do cool stuff like blasting off into space.
Then we realised that our little blue rocky marble thing, which is covered in one ocean of liquid ash and a another ocean of gaseous soup, is actually a bit smaller and more fragile than we thought. Then we looked at the other little rocky marble things and saw that doing all that lovely chemistry if let to go out of control, makes it very very hot indeed and not good for life at all.
The bottom line is that we've done science and we know that adding more and more Carbonic Acid into the ocean of gaseous soup which we live at the bottom of, is a Very Bad Idea™. We've known that it might be a bad idea for about 120 years and now we're beginning to see by means of uncontrolled experiment that is a Very Bad Idea™.
So to everyone who claims that climate change isn't real, wake up to yourself and read a basic science book. You clearly don't know what you are talking about and the fact that you either don't know or aren't aware of the basic chemistry which explains the reason why we don't all freeze to death, says that you are a fool. Also to everyone who claims that climate change isn't real, you haven't actually performed the experiment to prove otherwise; which means that purely from a risk assessment point of view, you should be not only ignored but actively told to sit down and shut up.
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