There'll be daily temperatures around 20℃ in the south... and huge storms in the north.
What it means: You might want to start thinking up a sick-day story your boss will believe, because weather forecasters reckon we’re going to have nicer weather than Portugal for the next few weeks, with temperatures getting up to 25℃. That might seem like nothing compared to the summer we’ve just had (the hottest for 108 years) but it’s warmer than Britain’s got at this time of year since 2011. The Met Office (our national weather reporters) also thinks there’s a 60-80 percent chance that we’ll have warmer-than-normal weather all the way up to Christmas.
You’d probably think it’d take an especially miserable person to be unhappy about sunshine. Enter economists (they don’t call this the dismal science for nothing). Basically, the problem is this: October’s warm weather is being caused by a tropical storm (that’s one step down from a hurricane) that’s currently over by the Canary Islands but has been sending some nice warm air our way. Unfortunately, it’s also sending over 80mph winds and heavy rain, which is going to batter the north of Britain. That’s likely to cause floods, “travel chaos”, damage to buildings and “danger to life”. None of this is good for individual people or the economy as a whole.
And it could be even worse (yeah, we’re really determined to suck all the joy out of this mini heatwave for you). Most scientist think all the unusual weather we’ve been having is because climate change is making all types of weather more extreme - so hot spells are getting hotter, cold spells colder, hurricanes and tropical storms more powerful etc. And lots of economists agree that climate change is going to be very, very bad for lots of parts of the economy, like farming and water supply and productivity and infrastructure and lots of other important stuff.
