Heatwaves are becoming the norm. This is what Britain will look like in the year 2052
Posted by FearMyCock@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 62 comments
Ok_Role_6215@reddit
No, it won't. Have you heard of the AMOC collapse? UK is gonna have its mini ice age.
Economy_Seat_7250@reddit
Sorry but the OP's username is FEARMYCOCK 😂
DMGerrr@reddit
Ahh, it may not be that kind of cock!
Link, after beating up a cuckoo: "chuckles I'm in danger"
artikzen@reddit
To be feared due to thermal expansion 😁
Dangerous_Air_7031@reddit
Or it's rotting.
SquirrelAkl@reddit
A post and username worthy of r/rimjobsteve
s0ngsforthedeaf@reddit
Is the cock getting warmer at a rate of 0.5c per decade?
Then I do not fear it.
RottenFarthole@reddit
Finally, a worthy opponent!
itwasallascream23@reddit
😂😂😂😂😂😂
morphemass@reddit
We actually need more climate communication like this because people still don't understand the realities. The future is an unknown country but we generally know which direction it is in. I'd actually put the described scenario as a middling case. We're likely to become a country of heat extremes with freezing winters and hot summers where extreme extremes in the mid-to-high 40s start to become common as we move to the next phase of global warming, commonly known as global burning.
It's hard to know what impacts this will have on society except that there will be periods where it ceases to function. Will the UK become a source of migrants to areas where the extremes are less and locally grown food is still available? Might we decide that the only solution is to abandon the cities and live underground? Might iced tea become the countries favourite drink? Who knows, but it's plain to see that 2050 will look very different to 2026.
loralailoralai@reddit
Well the uk used to be the biggest migrant source for Australia and you can survive here so maybe you need to rethink your houses.
Myth_of_Progress@reddit
Agreed completely, this article's introductory storytelling was thoroughly compelling.
Pythia007@reddit
Unless the AMOC collapses completely before then in which case temps will go way, way down (over the next century)
Jimmy_Fromthepieshop@reddit
Won't that cause more heat in summer and less in winter?
KetracelYellow@reddit
Yeah it will, I’m not sure where everyone is getting this colder climate from. We will have very cold winters but very hot summers.
Pythia007@reddit
No it won’t. Summer temperatures will revert to close to pre-industrial averages. However they will tend to be drier than previously. They will not continue to increase in temperature. Winters will be extremely cold. So the average British temperature will drop significantly.
DirewaysParnuStCroix@reddit
That's actually not the case. The suggestion that summer averages would revert back to pre-industrial temperatures is entirely founded upon what is known as model artifact. Essentially, it relies on the assumption that coupled simulations which apply coarse resolutions will produce a reliable interpretation of how the atmosphere responds to hypothetical convection collapse. There are numerous critical limitations in how the ocean component is applied, but I'll focus on the critical limitations of the atmospheric components. If we take van Westen et al.'s CESM-based simulations as an example, they apply a 2° resolution in the CAM atmospheric model. That's a significantly low resolution for atmospheric simulations, and renders the simulation incapable of reproducing the atmospheric responses which would sustain significantly hotter and drier summers in NW Europe. This applies to their RCP4.5/8.5 simulations too.
The correlation between North Atlantic subpolar cooling and subsequent intensified warming and drying in Western Europe is a well established phenomenon. Supporting information can be found via Oltmanns et al. (2024), Bischof et al. (2023) and Vautard et al. (2023). There is no reliable suggestion that an AMOC collapse will cause significant summer cooling in NW Europe and it's well established that coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations run on a centennial basis are not to be interpreted as forecasts or predictions. Haarsma et al. (2020) among other PRIMAVERA project reconstructions explore the structural limitations of present generation climate models and the bottlenecks caused by low resolution.
The present atmospheric anomaly is an exceptionally efficient demonstration as to how the atmospheric response to a reduced or absent AMOC can sustain significantly hotter and drier summers throughout Western Europe. My research focuses specifically on identifying potential summer warming responses in Western Europe under hypothetical future AMOC destabilisation. It's basically implausible for any significant reversal of summer warming to occur.
Pythia007@reddit
I am happy to stand corrected. I am not a climatologist and was relying on what I thought was the current consensus. But is it not so that in the specific case of the UK (the subject of the post) that the average annual temperature will fall dramatically? At least in the medium to long term say 50-100 years? Or did I get that wrong too?
s0ngsforthedeaf@reddit
With global warming counteracting that significantly.
XKryptix0@reddit
Not quite, in the Amoc collapse scenario the heat will be trapped more towards the equator while cooling the UK and Ireland to be more like Scandinavia.
LatzeH@reddit
You're wrong. Europe will feature a sharp, dynamic line of seperation between cold, arctic weather, and hot, dry weather. The line will go through Germany, but will rarely ever oscillate as far North as the UK.
Peak_District_hill@reddit
Paging u/Direwaysparnustcroix
DirewaysParnuStCroix@reddit
Yeah... the notion that summers would get colder is a ridiculous assumption in this context. Even the more ardent proponents of conventional AMOC collapse simulations concede that summer is an area of uncertainty and that the prerequisites required for cooling are highly seasonal in RCP4.5 scenarios.
LatzeH@reddit
It was my understanding that, as a baseline, European countries would simply match their respective latitudes - in the case of the UK; subarctic climate. Am I wrong?
DirewaysParnuStCroix@reddit
It's effectively not thermodynamically possible for an AMOC collapse under present or future conditions to initiate a reversal to subarctic conditions in Europe. The issue is that people misinterpret what AMOC reduction simulations are demonstrating and what they're not demonstrating. Due to the numerical construction of meridional heat transport in coarse resolution ocean models, these produce a highly laminar interpretation of how ocean circulation behaves in the North Atlantic. In simpler terms, they'll simulate a full cessation of poleward heat transport despite this not being a plausible scenario in practice. Additional issues regarding the coupling process between the ocean and atmosphere models results in a highly idealised interpretation of hypothetical feedbacks to suppressed convection. In the CESM model specifically, the CICE sea ice component is known to produce unrealistic sea ice regrowth, which results in unrealistic cooling in AMOC reduction experiments. The numerical limitations of coarse resolution coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations have only recently begun to be addressed with newer and higher resolution models being developed such as HighResMIP. These uncoupled simulations produce wildly different results when compared to conventional AMOC reduction experiments, but because the higher resolution is resource intensive, so far there's no single coupled simulation of AMOC reduction that applies high resolution.
SubstanceStrong@reddit
Way down in winter yes. Way down in summer probably not so much. I mean we don’t know for sure. The UK will probably experience a climate similar to British Columbia
JackBlackBowserSlaps@reddit
You will get cold winters, but can still get hot summers
CampfireHeadphase@reddit
The author suggests better insulation of houses, which would help in both scenarios (assuming crops still grow, that is..)
FearMyCock@reddit (OP)
The article is collapse related because it describes how repeated extreme heatwaves could slowly overwhelm parts of society things like power cuts, water shortages, unsafe housing, transport failures, and pressure on healthcare.
SeVenMadRaBBits@reddit
Question is, will it ever stop increasing?
If it does, what is the hottest it will get? And how long will it stay that hot?
Slow_ConnectionR@reddit
It stops increasing roughly 2 decades after we reach net zero. Not counting feedback loops
NihiloZero@reddit
Which, importantly, means it will simply keep increasing. An Arctic Sea "blue ocean event" is expected this summer. Loss of the ice caps probably mean the struggle to prevent global warming is lost. David Suzuki is, unfortunately, correct.
ToBeFaaaiiiirrrrr@reddit
Everything is fucked, there's nothing material I can do about it... but I'm so grateful I got to grow up listening to David Suzuki, Bob McDonald and others on the CBC...
Frosti11icus@reddit
There are feedback loops that increase warming. All the carbon is captured in the ground, we are manually releasing a small portion of it. If we don't stop, most of what has been captured will start releasing, so it could get really really really hot in theory.
Johansen905@reddit
Don't think we need to wait that long
BadgerKomodo@reddit
We definitely won’t. More like 5 years time.
Bajadasaurus@reddit
If they confidently suggest these things might take place earlier, they'll be dismissed outright and potentially threatened with physical violence for the unforgivable, nefarious, illest of all intentions: fearmongering
TheCosmicGypsies@reddit
Even for the Guardian this is pretty ropey, if all the power is coming from renewables then we'd be fine with AC similar to Singapore
37iteW00t@reddit
I thought with the AMOC collapsing the entire UK would become drastically colder?
Pythia007@reddit
It will. Summers will not continue to warm. They will revert to pre-industrial levels. And possibly get drier. Winters will get extremely cold. Current agricultural practices will be untenable.
Interestingllc@reddit
Maybe we shouldn't be playing this game in the first place
Ghostwoods@reddit
Hotter summers, colder winters, far more drastic storms.
xobbelle@reddit
Anyone else coming to terms with the fact that they’ll die? My disabled ass faints in 30 degree summers. Enjoying the cool days while they last.
Sputnik-overdrive@reddit
So in reality, more like 2035
NihiloZero@reddit
Looks to me, lately, like it could be much sooner than that.
The "super" el nino is just starting, but we were already expecting a 52-year-low wheat harvest due to drought. The desert southwest... San Diego, L.A., Vegas, Phoenix, and so on... are all simply running out of water -- and there is no workaround or way to spin that. Globally, the situation isn't much better. They've been saying that the Arctic Sea might experience a "blue ocean event" for the first time this summer... and that could be the whole ballgame right there, all by itself.
jamesnaranja90@reddit
You can't beat that sub's optimism.
Wonderful_Valuable16@reddit
They call me pessimist, I call it realist.
BadgerKomodo@reddit
Same here. Pessimism is realism.
LatzeH@reddit
We better hope this is what Britain will look like in 2052 - if it does not, it's because AMOC has collapsed, in which case all of Europe is completely fucked.
JackBlackBowserSlaps@reddit
You will get cold winters, but can still get hot summers.
SubstanceStrong@reddit
This is the most plausible scenario according to science right now, but it’s really a guessing game exactly what will happen. Most likely it won’t be good though.
LatzeH@reddit
Nothing of which translates into arability.
RottenFarthole@reddit
Fucked, we will become either way.
But bukkake, we do not want.
-Yoda, probably
LatzeH@reddit
I'd prefer to be fucked in an arable climate, thank you very much.
Sbeast@reddit
Check out what these researchers discovered about India and climate change:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/5/22/india-is-being-left-to-die-in-the-heat
Own_Appointment_8410@reddit
I don't understand why this isn't reflected in my region of Brazil.
Hephaestus1816@reddit
31C here in the Midlands and it's not even midday. It's still spring. The overnight low in the bedroom last night was 24C, and that was with the window wide open. That's tropical heat.
Bajadasaurus@reddit
Oof! What's the humidity like there? I'm sure it's tropical, indeed.
KingRBPII@reddit
It’s going to get cold when the Gulf Stream shuts down and will do a mini ice age
JackBlackBowserSlaps@reddit
Lol watch too many movies. Cold winters yes, but can still get hot summers
BlackMassSmoker@reddit
I read as well that a big difference with todays heatwaves than what they were in the past is that they seem to come on very fast.
I
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/FearMyCock:
The article is collapse related because it describes how repeated extreme heatwaves could slowly overwhelm parts of society things like power cuts, water shortages, unsafe housing, transport failures, and pressure on healthcare.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1to1l21/heatwaves_are_becoming_the_norm_this_is_what/onxvvet/