Weather report for July 2020
Temperatures during July were normal for the time of the year. The average daily maximum was 20.5C and the minimum, 12.5C. The averages for 1981 - 2010 for Cleethorpes tell us that we would expect them to be 20.7C and 12.4C respectively. Again, however rainfall was double what should be expected for July. In Scartho we received 106mm over 4 days of rain rather than the Met Office average for Cleethorpes of 52.4mm over 8 days. It can be seen that we had double the usual amount of rain in half the number of days. Although, the country was fortunate that there were no major floods, rain falling in deluges such as this are the cause of disaster. As the climate warms, the atmosphere can hold increasing amounts of water vapour so that when it rains it does so much more catastrophically.
Greenland's ice cap is often used as a barometer for climate change. The loss of ice there lurched forward again last year, breaking the previous record by 15%. A new analysis says that the scale of the melt was unprecedented in records dating back to 1948. Scientists say that ongoing carbon emissions are pusing Greenland into an era of more extreme melting. A major international report on Greenland released last December concluded that it was losing ice seven times faster than it was during the 1990s. According to Danish scientist Martin Stendel, the 2019 losses would be enough to cover the entire UK with around 2.5m of melt water. Recent reports have suggested that Greenland may have passed a point of no return, that the level of global warming that the world is already committed to because of carbon emissions. means that all of Greenland's ice cap will melt. If Greeland's ice losses continue on their current trajectory an extra 25 million people could be flooded each year by the end of this century.
