Heat wave in Scotland?
April 24th, 2007
A beautiful sunny day here in Edinburgh, with the temperature in the garden up to 19 deg C today and not dropping below 12 deg C last night. Not so long ago we’d have simply have enjoyed the above average temperatures. Now, we feel a bit guilty and wonder about climate change.
When the IPCC’s first report was published in February, it concluded that world temperatures could increase by 3 deg C by 2100. For us in chilly Scotland, that sounded like good news 
However, The Guardian yesterday ran a piece Six steps to hell by Mark Lynas, author of the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. In it he spells out what the planet will look like if temperatures rise one, two, three, four, five, or six degrees. It makes pretty depressing reading:
Three degrees alone would see increasing areas of the planet being rendered essentially uninhabitable by drought and heat … With extreme weather continuing to bite – hurricanes may increase in power by half a category above today’s top-level Category Five – world food supplies will be critically endangered. This could mean hundreds of millions – or even billions – of refugees moving out from areas of famine and drought in the sub-tropics towards the mid-latitudes … In northern Europe and the UK, summer drought will alternate with extreme winter flooding as torrential rainstorms sweep in from the Atlantic – perhaps bringing storm surge flooding to vulnerable low-lying coastlines as sea levels continue to rise. Those areas still able to grow crops and feed themselves, however, may become some of the most valuable real estate on the planet, besieged by millions of climate refugees from the south.
It casts a chilly shadow over an unusually warm spring day.