U.K. Declares First-Ever Warning For Unprecedented Extreme Heat

The United Kingdom on Friday issued its first-ever “red warning” about exceptional heat as the typically mild country braces for triple-digit temperatures.

Officials announced the red warning, which constitutes a national emergency and means even healthy people are at risk of death, in anticipation of severely high temperatures Monday and Tuesday across central, northern, eastern and southeastern England, though weather will also be very hot in other regions of the U.K.

“Here in the U.K., we’re used to treating hot spells as a chance to go and play in the sun,” Penny Endersby, the chief executive of the U.K. Met Office, the country’s weather service, said in a video message. “This is not that sort of weather. Our lifestyles and our infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming.”

The weather will be “exceptional, perhaps record-breaking,” warned Paul Gundersen, the Met Office’s chief meteorologist.

There is a 50% chance of temperatures topping 40 degrees Celsius, the equivalent of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The highest temperature ever recorded in the U.K. was 38.7 degrees Celsius in 2019, or nearly 102 degrees Fahrenheit.

Citing climate change and rising global temperatures, Endersby pled with people to take the weather event seriously by staying out of the sun and keeping cool.

“We’ve seen when climate change has driven such unprecedented severe weather events all around the world, it can be difficult for people to make the best decisions in these situations, because nothing in their life experience has led them to know what to expect,” she said.

In 2019, officials tallied nearly 900 extra deaths in England due to heat waves.

Though La Niña conditions have slightly tempered hot weather in 2022, it’s still on track to be somewhere between the fourth and eighth hottest year since record-keeping began in the 1850s.

An April United Nations report on the state of the climate warned that the path to avert complete climate catastrophe is narrowing and that the global community is falling short of reaching the emissions goals outlined in the Paris climate accord of 2016.