Beating the Heat
What to wear: Fact or fiction?
Read the 10 statements below and decide if each one is true or false. Amend the false statements and find evidence from your graph to justify your decision.
10 statements
- The UK’s climate will not become warmer.
- Summers may become wetter.
- High factor sun cream will be widely used in winter 2080.
- Very cold winters will be more frequent.
- There will be greater warming in the south and east than in the north and west.
- Ear-muffs will not be a necessity in 2080.
- The High Emissions scenario estimates that London will be 10°C warmer in summer 2080.
- Clothing manufacturers need to produce more waterproof trousers.
- Winters may become wetter.
- High summer temperatures will be more frequent.
The two scenarios suggest that average annual temperatures in the UK will increase by between 2.2°C and 3.5°C by 2080. This depends on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. In future we may also experience wetter winters and substantially drier summers.
Some conditions which we now consider highly unusual could become commonplace. For England and Wales, for example, a summer as hot as the one in 2006 may occur in two out of three years by 2080. Extremes in weather such as heavy rain, heat-waves and gales will also occur more frequently and with greater intensity.
Sea levels will also continue to rise around most of the UK’s shoreline. By 2080, sea level rise may be between 2cm below (Low Emissions) and 58cm above (High Emissions) the present level in Western Scotland; but between 26 and 28cm above the present level in southeast England.