HAILSTONES the size of golf balls. A month’s rain in a day. Tropical nights for a week. These are some of the severe weather conditions affecting the UK.

Today, unseasonably high winds are forecast to batter Wales and the West Country as Boris Johnson’s Government announced that over the next year more than £860 million will be invested in flood prevention schemes across Britain.

Yet other countries have had it much worse, with many lives lost to flash flooding, landslides, wildfires and soaring temperatures.

It’s only July but 2021 has already seen a frightening array of extreme weather events from record snowfalls in Madrid -– yes, Madrid – which brought the Spanish capital to a standstill to heavy rainfall in western Germany which destroyed homes and bridges along the River Ahr, and the worst dust-storm in China which grounded flights and closed schools as the sky over Beijing turned orange with the dust mixing with pollution to create a hazardous cocktail. Meanwhile, there’s been a “heavier-than-normal” start to America’s wildfire season with Oregon suffering one of the largest blazes in its history, destroying more than 364,000 acres of land.

READ MORE: Extreme heat of 40C will become ‘new normal’ in UK, leading meteorologists say

In Zhengzhou, a city of some 12 million in central China, hundreds of thousands of residents had to be evacuated from their homes after a year’s rainfall fell in just 72 hours. Horrifically, 12 people died in an underground train as the flood cascaded in – rescued survivors described how water leaked through the carriage’s doors until it became difficult to breathe. Then there was the so-called “heat dome” in Canada, where temperatures touched 49.6C, surpassing the record not by 0.1C or 0.2C but by a terrifying 4.6C. In other words, the climate emergency is right here, right now.

Yesterday, a Met Office report, summarising Britain’s climate in 2020, was not just grim but scary.

Last year was the third warmest, fifth wettest and eighth sunniest on record – no other year has been in the top 10 on all three criteria.

Those who dislike hot weather will be aghast at the report’s suggestion British summers are set to see temperatures rise regularly above 40C and, this is even if humanity manages to limit global warming to 1.5C, which the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow is aiming to achieve through net-zero emissions by 2050.

Early August 2020 saw temperatures hit 34C on six consecutive days with five tropical nights when the mercury did not drop below 20C, making it one of the most significant heatwaves to affect southern England in 60 years.

Data going back to 1772 shows the first years of this century have been up to 1C warmer than 1901 to 2000, and up to 1.5C warmer than 1801 to 1900.

As summers get hotter and wetter, winters are also becoming warmer – the average winter temperature for last year was 5.3C, 1.6C higher than the 1981 to 2010 average.

Liz Bentley from the Royal Meteorological Society said the world was already seeing extreme heat as a result of a warming of 1.1C to 1.2C above pre-industrial levels.

“If you take that up by another 0.3C, these [heatwaves] are just going to become much more intense. We’re likely to see 40C in the UK although we have never seen those kinds of temperatures [before].

“As we hit 1.5C of global warming, that’s going to not just become something we see once or twice, it’ll start to become something we see on a much more regular basis.”

Her colleague Mike Kendon, lead author of the report, said the figures indicated a new normal for the UK.

“In seven out of the last 10 years, we’ve seen temperatures of 34C in the UK compared to seven out of the previous 50 years before that. So, this is an indication our baseline of our climate is changing and what we regard as normal is changing.”

Changes in temperature and rainfall patterns are increasingly impacting the natural world with the first-leaf dates in 2020 recorded an average of 10.4 days earlier than the 1999 to 2019 baseline across a range of common British shrub and tree species.

Leaves are also falling earlier with the end-of-season bare tree dates for 2020 coming 4.3 days earlier than the baseline across the same species, the report said. Darren Moorcroft, from the Woodland Trust, said the research could point to future breakdowns within food chains, leading to some species struggling to survive.

A new paper from the Climate Crisis Advisory Group questions whether rapid heating in the Arctic region is driving changes in the jet stream that has influenced recent weather extremes such as the flooding in Germany and record heat in Finland, Siberia and British Columbia.

It said: “These are all outlier events that exceed what one would expect if it were ‘only’ a 1.2C warming impact [the amount the Earth has already warmed by since pre-industrial times].”

“Greenhouse gas levels are already too high for a manageable future for humanity.”

In a few days, experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will publish a comprehensive assessment of global warming since 2013, described as a “wake-up call” – as if another one were needed.

The document will guide global leaders, who will converge on Scotland for COP26 in November. The summit could be our last, best hope that the inheritance we pass onto our children and grandchildren isn’t a truly devastating one. If ever there was a time for countries to put aside their differences and act, this is it.