DEC 14: The UK is experiencing its warmest year in more than three centuries and will likely break a record at the world’s oldest registry of temperatures.
The mean temperature for 2006 will be 10.84 degrees (51.5 degrees Fahrenheit) based on current weather patterns, making it the warmest since records began in the year 1659, preliminary figures released today by the UK government’s weather forecaster and the University of East Anglia show.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to the UK. The global average temperature also is heading for one of the warmest years on record, the Met Office, the government’s forecasting arm, said. ‘‘When you see the records that have fallen this year — monthly records, seasonal records — they lead to the inescapable conclusion that temperatures are on their way up,’’ Barry Grommett, a Met Office meteorologist, said in a phone interview.
‘‘The trends that we’ve seen are quite remarkable.’’ This July’s mean temperature of 19.7 degrees in Britain made it the warmest month ever, and the 12.6 degree autumn was a record for that season, the statistics show. Warmer weather may curtail demand for natural gas in Britain, the European Union’s biggest consumer of that fuel. Gas is used to heat about three-quarters of UK homes and powers almost 40 % of its electricity plants.
—Bloomberg
