Outlook? Terrifying: TV weather presenters on the hell and horror of the climate crisis

Tuesday 19 July 2022 is a day that will stay with Ben Rich for ever. “I got up and immediately checked the weather observations to see what was going on,” he remembers. “Then I went to work for my shift. The station was really hot, the train was really hot, and I remember having this moment. I got a bit emotional about it, to be honest. I thought: this is huge. And if it can happen once, why can’t it happen again?”

That was the day last year when the temperature in the UK surpassed 40C (104F) for the first time ever. Rich is a BBC weather presenter and meteorologist. “In my training, which was only about 10 years ago, I was led to believe that 40C in the UK was nigh on impossible, because there are all sorts of factors that should stop that from happening, not least the fact that we are surrounded by ocean. It should be too moist for temperatures to get that high.”

It didn’t come out of the blue – the computer models had been predicting it for a couple of weeks – but still it didn’t seem possible. “We were looking at it, going: no, this isn’t realistic,…