Hot? Yes.
Last night was the warmest in at least 50 years in Oxford, with our Radcliffe Met observers recording 21.2C. Only 4 others nights have been above 20 degrees, including 11th August 1997 (20.5C) and 4th July 1976 (20.3C).
2016 is blowing away heat records
This coincides with news that June was one of the hottest on record globally, with the first half of 2016 blowing away heat records and June 2016 marking the 14th consecutive month of record-breaking heat.
According to US agencies NASA and NOAA, confirmed by Oxford alumni Gavin Schmidt at NASA, June was 0.9C hotter than the 20th century average.
Read more:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-half-of-2016-blows-away-temperature-records
New research links heat wave deaths to climate change
Earlier this month, ECI & Department of Physics researcher Dr Daniel Mitchell and colleagues published a study in Environmental Research Letters which links the 2003 heat deaths in London and Partis to climate change.
In Paris, the hottest city in Europe during the 2003 heatwave, 506 out of 735 summer deaths recorded were due to a heatwave made worse by man-made climate change.
Read the full paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/7/074006
Read an article in the Guardian about the research: www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/08/global-warming-to-blame-for-hundreds-of-heatwave-deaths-scientists-say
