In response to record-breaking warm, wet weather in Britain, professor Myles Allen of the Climate Research Programme at University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, has declared normal weather to be a thing of the past.
Speaking in an interview with BBC’s Radio 4, Allen responded: “You asked ‘is this the new normal’, well as I stressed, normal weather, unchanged over generations, is now a thing of the past. And if we’re building buildings and building infrastructure, we’re going to have to use climate simulations to work out what the weather will be like that that infrastructure will have to tolerate in 50 years’ time.”
“Here in Oxford we maintain the world’s longest daily weather record, we just beat the previous record by a whopping two and a half degrees and that record was set back in 1852. You’re not meant to beat weather records by that kind of margin and just like in athletics if you start doing so, it’s a sign that something’s actually changed," said Allen. He also said that weather patterns such as this were predicted by an intergovernmental panel convened on the subject back in 1990.
"We should expect the weather of the 2040s to be as different from today as today’s weather is from conditions in the 1970s."
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