Rebecca Emerton

In a lot of places, there's an increasing duration more of the year that's being affected by heat stress, whereas in other places, it might be that the maximum feels like temperatures

are increasing or they're starting to see levels of strong heat stress where they haven't experienced it before so it's quite relative kind of based on the baseline climate they started with in the 1970s but we're seeing similar trends in terms of more frequent and more severe feels like temperatures on every continent is the seasonality of it changing as well you know when the first heat wave sets in or when the last one sort of peters out at the end of the season

Yeah, that is something that we're seeing, particularly across the northern hemisphere.

We're seeing that, we call it the heat stress season, has increased in duration since the 1970s.

So the most dramatic changes, I think, were in Europe, Africa and North America, where, take for example Europe, strong heat stress might start now in June rather than in July, moderate heat stress in May rather than June.

And that's just an average across the continent.

But that is something we're seeing in parts of Europe too.

Yes, that's definitely part of it.

So one aspect is this increase of around 1.4 degrees for the global average is very much a global average, and that can vary substantially

when you look at a regional scale in terms of the rate and the amount of warming.

And then, as you said, there are the other factors.

So at the global scale, there's more water vapour in the atmosphere as the climate is warming.

There are changes in solar radiation.

For example, in Europe, there's quite a strong increasing trend in solar radiation and sunshine duration with a corresponding reduction in cloud cover.

So, yeah, these factors all accounted for in these trends.