Ed Hawkins

Ed Hawkins

@edhawkins.org

Climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading | IPCC AR6 Lead Author | MBE | Views own

30.2K followers662 following1.1K posts

Ed Hawkins reposted

The 2026 UNEP Emissions Gap Report is out: The Point of Return. 🌍🌡️🔥 It's sobering but actionable. Decades of inadequate climate action have closed off opportunities to limit warming, but ambitious action today can still prevent much greater harm. A thread of some of the highlights 🧵

Ed Hawkins reposted

The warming will continue until we reach net zero emissions. At which point, we will need to live with whatever climate we’ve ended up in. The sooner we reach net zero, the less extreme that climate will be, and the easier and less costly it will be to adapt to it.

And, yes, we need more reservoirs, with less leakage and wastage, but that is not going to help us in the immediate future.

Ed Hawkins reposted

Ed Hawkins reposted

Ed Hawkins reposted

Drought-affected areas in Europe have expanded substantially in recent decades. ​ By the end of August 2026, meteorological drought affected around 46% of Europe, with 40% of the affected area under extreme drought, a much larger share than in 2025. See more: climate.copernicus.eu/european-sum...

If you've used any climate datasets, you've likely benefitted from work of people like Simon. He is an unsung hero, helping build sub-daily to monthly global climate datasets on which we all rely over the past decade.

Simon Noone@simonj1967.bsky.social

IN HER CORNER ❤️ My wife Maggie is recovering after treatment for stage 3B ovarian cancer and is thankfully disease-free. I’m taking on an 8-week boxing camp towards a November charity bout to raise €5,000 for OvaCare. Instagram:@simon.j.noone. Please donate/share: eventmaster.ie/fundraising/...

Ed Hawkins reposted

Europe didnt just experience an exceptionally hot summer in 2026. It experienced a summer where multiple climate extremes reinforced each other. First - temperature records were broken at daily, monthly and seasonal scales across Europe Read more: climate.copernicus.eu/summer-revie...

Another "need to extend the y-axis" moment... Average temperature in Central England for Jan-Sep for each year since 1772. It is 0.8°C higher in 2026 than any other previous year.

Everyday weather in a warmer world Imagine the weather patterns that happened in 1903 occurred again in a warmer world - how would that weather be experienced differently? Thomas et al. answer this question, highlighting the thermodynamic response of the climate: esd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

esd.copernicus.orgEveryday weather in a warmer worldAbstract. How would the weather of a year from history be experienced in a warmer world? We reconstruct the weather of 1903 using a reanalysis system that assimilates only surface pressure observation...

Ed Hawkins reposted

New version of the HadCRUT global temperature dataset released @colinmorice.bsky.social HadCRUT5.2 uses HadSST4.2 (with improved adjustments for SST biases during 1933-1961) and CRUTEM5.2 (with updates to stations in China, USA and Canada). Here is the difference from the previous version 5.1

Ed Hawkins reposted

📣 CCNow is thrilled to announce the winners of the 2026 CCNow Journalism Awards! Our awards program honors excellent reporting on many critical dimensions of the climate story. Together, their work constitutes the leading edge of climate storytelling. ...🧵↓

Ed Hawkins reposted

🌍 54 million historical weather observations from 95 countries have been unlocked & made freely available online. 📚 With records dating back to 1837, the project enabled the discovery of an HMS Terror logbook & an international weather station network Read ⤵️ www.metoffice.gov.uk/blog/2026/ho...

metoffice.gov.ukHow 54 million historical weather records are being made globally accessibleFor more than a century, the Met Office's National Meteorological Archive has held a treasure trove of historical weather data, some of it dating back to 1837. Now, thanks to a major project, tens of ...

Ed Hawkins reposted

August 2026 was the warmest August ever recorded globally and the warmest month on record El Niño is pushing temperatures higher, but these records are occurring in a climate that has already been fundamentally altered by decades of burning fossil fuels heating our planet #Climate 🧪⚒️🌊

How much warmer was summer 2026 than 1976 for the UK? Interesting differences between daytime (Tmax) and nighttime (Tmin). 2026 was much warmer than 1976, including in rural areas. (The only exception is daytime temperatures in Scotland.)

Summer in England was record smashing - 2026 was 0.75°C warmer for a seasonal average than the previous record set in... <checks notes>... 2025. The remaining seasonal records from 1976 were all broken by a significant margin this year. (These were the seasonal average Tmax for England and UK)

Ed Hawkins reposted

News we could not be more excited to share: the description paper of our high-resolution dataset is now available for review and comment at ESSD. The record provides global coverage at 0.25° resolution, built from 58,311 weather stations extending back to 1750. Pre-print: tinyurl.com/9dw7jbnf

tinyurl.comBerkeley Earth Surface Temperature – High-Resolution (BEST-HR): a 0.25° Global Gridded Temperature Data Set for Climate MonitoringAbstract. We present version 2 of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature dataset, a global observational temperature record that now features enhanced spatial resolution (0.25° × 0.25°) and a new regr...

In June 1944, Captain James Stagg faced the unenviable task of advising whether the weather conditions would allow the D-Day landings to proceed, with the lives of 160,000 troops and the fate of the war in the balance.

Using AIFS-ENS, the ECMWF machine-learning ensemble forecast system, we recreate the forecasts in the days before 6th June 1944. Even at short range, AIFS-ENS moves the storm too rapidly into the Norwegian Sea giving undue confidence for favourable conditions for the landing in Normandy.

Ed Hawkins reposted

Global warming is set to cross 1.5°C, pushing climate risks and impacts to increasingly dangerous heights, a new UNEP report warns.   Predicted impacts include extreme weather and threats to human health and economies.

Think it’s time for a new extended temperature colour scale…

Summer 2026 is provisionally the UK’s warmest summer on record with the season’s mean temperature made around 130 times more likely due to human-induced climate change. Here, we delve into the numbers 🧵

Ed Hawkins reposted

Summer 2026 is provisionally the UK’s warmest summer on record with the season’s mean temperature made around 130 times more likely due to human-induced climate change. Here, we delve into the numbers 🧵

Although we can’t easily verify these cloud maps (and they could be made much more realistic), images like this help us understand what troops, sailors and pilots actually faced that day, in a way that written reports alone cannot.

Over the weekend, a storm in the Baltic states caused significant disruption to power supplies and at least 2 deaths. An experimental reanalysis-based attribution approach suggests that ~20% more rain fell than if the same weather pattern had occurred in a world that was 1°C cooler.

And why was there more rain from this storm? The atmosphere is warmer now than in a 1950s climate, which means it can hold more water, so when it rains, it rains more. The total column water (precipitable water) differences between the factual and counter-factual reanalyses show this clearly.

Ed Hawkins reposted

this is very cool

Ed Hawkins@edhawkins.org

Over the weekend, a storm in the Baltic states caused significant disruption to power supplies and at least 2 deaths. An experimental reanalysis-based attribution approach suggests that ~20% more rain fell than if the same weather pattern had occurred in a world that was 1°C cooler.

Ed Hawkins reposted

Climate change is increasing the intensity of extreme rain, and using multiple methods can increase our confidence in this. We've been working on a new storyline technique:

Ed Hawkins@edhawkins.org

Over the weekend, a storm in the Baltic states caused significant disruption to power supplies and at least 2 deaths. An experimental reanalysis-based attribution approach suggests that ~20% more rain fell than if the same weather pattern had occurred in a world that was 1°C cooler.

Ed Hawkins reposted

Projection has become reality 22 years ago, Christoph Schär et al. published a landmark paper in Nature explaining that the 2003 heatwave was a harbinger of things to come. The study featured an iconic figure - shown in countless lectures - illustrating how outlandish the event was at the time