The big takeaway today seems to be that the immediate emergency is easing across much of Europe.Fingers crossed, next week will not be dominated by stories of tourists fleeing wildfires.However, everyone agrees the last 10 days feel like a turning point.As experts have pointed out elsewhere in these pages, we cannot escape climate change – even if we’re from the UK, our holidays will be impacted. And the countries where our food comes from.So what should happen in future summers, if more of them will face this sort of disruption to our plans?Chris Haslam, travel writer at The Times, suggested the timings of the school holidays could change to avoid families being restricted to travelling in the hottest months.”We need to change the school holiday system so people can go in the spring and autumn, so people can avoid these ridiculous mid-summer temperatures,” he said.Would you support such a change? And others to help us adapt to the heat?
US power generators will likely burn a record amount of natural gas for a second day in a row today, the hottest day so far this summer, as homes and businesses crank up their air conditioners amid a brutal heatwave.
As we reported earlier in our 4.10pm post, “dangerous” levels of heat are forecast for much of the eastern United States.
Meteorologists said Friday will be the hottest day of the summer so far in the lower 48 states of the US – and the second hottest on record.
To keep providing air conditioners with electricity, data provider Refinitiv forecast power generators would burn about 52.9 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of gas on Friday, which would top the current record of 52.3 bcfd on Thursday and recent highs of 50.3 bcfd on 14 July and 49.6 bcfd on 20 July, 2022.
One billion cubic feet of gas is usually enough to supply about five million US homes for a day.
Despite the extreme heat, however, no US grid operators have taken more extreme actions to manage supply and demand – like calls for conservation or rotating outages – and none were projecting that power use would break all-time highs this week.
Watching the chaos of wildfires across the Mediterranean has been a surreal experience for most of us here in the UK.That’s because, despite some scorching sunshine earlier in the summer, July has pretty much been a washout.Perhaps the extreme heat endured by those elsewhere should make us more grateful for the drizzle in good old Blighty.But rain in July still feels a disappointment.
I’m sorry to say our latest Sky News weather forecast remains disheartening.Low pressure to the northwest of the UK will result in plenty of showers over the next few days, along with some more persistent rain at times.
The only silver lining on Saturday is that some parts of the country will stay dry through much of the day and temperatures in the warmer spots will reach 24C.
As we told you earlier, London’s Labour mayor has won a High Court battle with several Conservative councils on his ultra low emission zone (ULEZ) plan.
Sadiq Khan will go ahead with expanding the ULEZ to London’s outer boroughs in August. It will see older, more polluting cars charged a daily fee for travel in the capital – to discourage pollution, with the intention of achieving cleaner air in the capital.
Mr Khan has faced pressure from his own Labour party leader – Sir Keir Starmer – after the policy was blamed for Labour’s failure to win the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election earlier this month.
Leave a Reply