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Sea levels around the UK are rising much faster than a century ago, while the country is warming slightly more than the global average, leading meteorologists said on Thursday.
The annual study – The State of the UK Climate 2021 – found that recent decades have been “warmer, wetter and sunnier” than the 20th century.
It’s coming hot on the heels of temperatures topping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in England for the first time last week, setting a record high of 40.3 degrees Celsius.
“This year’s report continues to show the impact of global temperature rise on the UK climate,” the Met Office, the country’s meteorological authority, said in a summary.
It added that the results “confirm that climate change is not just a problem for the future and that it is already affecting the conditions we experience here at home.”
Meteorologists noted in the report that in some places over the past three decades, sea levels had risen more than twice as fast as they did in the early 20th century.
They have increased by about 16.5 cm (6.5 in) since 1990 — about three to 5.2 mm per year, compared to 1.5 mm per year at the beginning of the last century.
This is exposing more coastal areas to larger and more frequent storm surges and “wind-driven swells,” the Met Office said.
Svetlana Jevrejeva of the National Oceanographic Center said there was evidence the rise was due to increased ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Melting glaciers around the world and warming of the ocean are also to blame, she noted.
“As sea levels rise, storm surges may have more impact,” Jevrejeva warned.
The annual study also found the UK has been warming at a broadly consistent but “slightly higher” rate than global average temperatures.
The Met Office’s Mike Kendon, lead author of the report, said record temperatures, like last week’s unprecedented heatwave, were becoming “more routine than exceptional”.
“It is significant that while we view 2021 as near average temperature in the context of current climate, if that had happened just over three decades ago it would have been one of the warmest years in Britain on record,” he added.
The UK hosted the COP26 summit last November, where numerous countries agreed collective action to try to prevent catastrophic climate change.
But there are growing fears that many could falter on fulfilling pledges, including stopping funding for fossil fuel projects abroad, as they scramble to replace Russian energy imports.
In Britain, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – the favorite in a leadership battle to replace outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson – has vowed to scrap energy bill charges earmarked for the renewable sector to help people through a deepening cost-of-living crisis.
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