The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

U.K. sees hottest day on record, with temperatures hitting 40 Celsius

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Updated July 19, 2022 at 3:04 p.m. EDT|Published July 18, 2022 at 6:44 p.m. EDT
A person shelters in the shade of the Bank of England during a heat wave in London on July 18. (Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg News)
6 min

LONDON — Has it ever, in human history, been this hot in the British Isles? Maybe not.

If you want to mark an unnatural, scary, real-world data point for climate change, it is here in Britain, right now, which saw its hottest day on record Tuesday. Temperatures in six locations reached 40 Celsius or higher, with London Heathrow and St. James Park hitting 40.2 Celsius — or 104.3 Fahrenheit. It’s an extreme-weather episode, a freak peak heat, not seen since modern record keeping began a century and a half ago.