The exceptional heatwave affected large parts of the UK is almost certainly a result of human induced climate change, say a group of international scientists.

The findings are released by the World Weather Attribution group - a collection of climate scientists from South Africa, Germany, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, US and the UK, who collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the heatwave.

Using published peer-reviewed methods, they analysed how human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of this heat and concluded that likelihood of observing such an event in a 1.2C cooler world is extremely low, and “statistically impossible” in two out of the three analysed models. Human-caused climate change made the event at least 10 times more likely too. In the models, the same event would be about 2C less hot in a 1.2C cooler world, which is a much smaller change in intensity than observed.

The observational analysis also showed that a UK heatwave would be about 4°C cooler in preindustrial times.

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