Simon King

London isn't just going, it's cooking.

We must act with far greater urgency to strictly limit the magnitude and duration of any overshoot beyond 1.5 degrees.

The heat dome is essentially a large area of high pressure.

So in meteorology, when you've got a high pressure, that essentially means that air is descending down the atmosphere.

So when you've got the air coming down through the atmosphere, it's drying out as it does so, and it's heating up.

as it does so as well.

So that drying out, that heating up means that you've got more sunshine and therefore more sunshine is reaching the ground, heating the ground and heating it up from below.

But it's also, as the air is descending, it's compressing.

So think of a bicycle pump.

As you pump up a bicycle tyre and you put in the pump, you feel your hand getting warm and that's the air compressing and heating up.

So this heat dome is essentially this process of a large area of high pressure which becomes static, it doesn't move and all that heat builds

builds and it just doesn't get released anywhere.

It's trapped underneath it.

And that's why we see those temperatures rise sometimes really quite rapidly.

Well, climate change is making it worse.

Climate scientists have been very clear over the last few decades that heat waves in the future will become more intense, more frequent, more prolonged.

They'll get hotter.

And this is exactly what we're seeing.

So the temperatures in Europe have been rising significantly.

gradually over the last decade or so.