Will temperature records be broken today? You bet they will. By the end of the day you can be sure we’ll be bombarded with headlines along the lines of ‘Records tumble as Britain wilts’ – or, in the case of the Guardian, ‘Record-breaking heat heightens fears of climate crisis’. But don’t get too excited. Read on a little and you will find that the records which have been broken will seem just a little less dramatic than they at first appeared. The reason we keep having ‘record-breaking’ heat is not so much because of climate change – although rising global temperatures are slightly increasing the chances of records being broken – but because there are so many records to break. This is especially the case since it became fashionable for meteorologists to start using daily temperature records: the highest, or lowest, temperatures recorded in a particular location on a particular day of the year.
The trouble is that this creates so many records it is inevitable they are being broken all the time
The trouble is that this creates so many records it is inevitable they are being broken all the time.
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