Exclusive data compiled from the Met Office's Hadley Centre supercomputer reveals an alarming climate trajectory, with scientists warning that the human fingerprint on climate change is now unmistakable. Over the past 30 years, global temperatures have risen by half a degree, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by nearly 2 million square kilometres, sea levels have climbed by about 10cm, and atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 60 parts per million (17%), according to figures released to mark the centre's 30th anniversary.
Professor Peter Stott, a climate attribution expert at the Hadley Centre, said the current climate is 'completely different from what we had 30 years ago' and 'completely outside the bounds of natural variation'. He noted that early projections of 0.5°C warming in the UK between 1990 and 2020 due to fossil fuel emissions had proven accurate. Global temperatures are now higher than any level recorded since 1850 or inferred from tree rings over thousands of years, while CO₂ concentrations exceed anything seen in million-year-old ice cores.
The Hadley Centre was opened in 1990 alongside the first UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warning of 'serious consequences' from greenhouse gas emissions. Despite initial scepticism, including from within her own cabinet, the centre has remained at the forefront of climate modelling. Scientists have expanded models to incorporate biological carbon cycles and the impacts of fossil fuels on temperature, Arctic ice, sea-level rise, flooding, storms, and droughts.
Future projections indicate that by mid-century, a 60-year-old Briton is likely to experience a climate 1.2°C warmer than at their birth. The data underscores that a generation has grown up in a climate unprecedented in a millennium, with heat records being broken with increasing frequency. 'The human fingerprint is everywhere,' Stott concluded.
