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Climate change is a global phenomenon. It can be more problematic in areas where it is already hot and humid. But what does the climate crisis mean for the relatively mild UK To find out, We have reconstructedThe climate at a certain point in the distant past, when volcanoes had pumped approximately as much carbon into our atmosphere as it does today. We knew it would have been hot – but we didn’t expect it to have been so rainy.
Future changes in climate and their consequences for the UK are difficult to predict, but we do know that humans have already caused an increase in temperature of nearly 1°C in the UK and about a 6% IncreaseIn rainfall. Climate models predict a future of more extreme weather with more rainfall, warmer summers, milder winters, and more rainfall. Although some may not mind milder winters, and others might enjoy hotter summers more than others, less people would prefer more rain and stronger storms.
We can use the past to determine how likely these doomsday scenarios might be. We know that climates have changed throughout Earth’s 4.5 billion year existence (though not at today’s speed) and by reconstructing and studying these changes we can explore climates never experienced by people. Recently, Published resultsOne such experiment looked at the UK.
The Pliocene is back
We looked at the Pliocene, which was around 2.6 million to 5.3 million years ago. This was the last time the UK was significantly more warm than it is now. Its landscape was similar to the humid forests in modern south-east China.
Matt Pound, Author provided
According to climate modeling studies, the world may experience Pliocene climates. By the 2030s. To understand what this might mean in the UK, fossilised pollen was taken from Essex and Suffolk. The type of pollen can reveal what kind of plants were in season at that time and how the climate was overall. Combining this with sophisticated computational techniques to reconstruct past climates from plant remains, we were able get a sense for the climate millions of year ago.
Our research shows that Pliocene Britain would’ve had slightly warmer winters but 25% more rainfall, with most of this extra rain occurring in the winter.
Continue reading to the Miocene
If CO₂ emissions do not stabilise in the coming decade, we will be back to climates not experienced since an even earlier period known as the Miocene (between 5 million and 23 million years ago). Back then, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were somewhere between 400 and 600 parts per million (ppm), very similar to present-day levels of 419ppm and the 500ppm to 650ppm expected by 2070. This is why this era is so popular. Smaller Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, has recently been identified by the IPCC as an “Interval of interest” that may contain some clues about future anthropogenic warming.
Matt Pound, Author provided
What would the UK look like at that time? Fossil pollen from the Peak District and Anglesey provides insight into climate if CO₂ emissions peak between 2040 and 2080. The Peak District’s pollen is 12 million years older than the Anglesey pollen (by approximately 2 million years). It gives us an indication of climates similar to that potentially coming in the mid-21st century, with winter temperature increases of 3°C and summers 2°C warmer.
The fossil pollen from Anglesey was the oldest we studied and reconstructs a remarkably different climate from the present day: winters and summers 6°C warmer than today and a 61% increase in annual rainfall.
Floods would be more common if heavy rains were more frequent. Floods are the most common natural disaster in the UK. Extreme flooding is likely to cause widespread damage to roads, rails, homes, livelihoods, and natural ecosystems in the future.
Storm surges that are larger and more likely than ever to breach coastal defenses will be at greater risk due to rising flood risk and rising sea levels. One study was cited in the IPCC’s latest report shows how warming of 3.5°C-4.8°C by 2080 could increase the cost of flooding in the UK almost 15-fold under high CO₂ emission scenarios.
