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It's easy to think of this exceptionally hot weather as unusual, but the depressing truth is that climate change means it is now normal to experience record-breaking temperatures.
Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase year on year. The rate of growth has slowed slightly, but energy-related CO2 emissions were still up almost 1% last year, according to the International Energy Agency, a global energy watchdog.
And the higher the global temperature, the higher the risk of heatwaves, says NAME_1, a climatologist at the Grantham Institute of Climate Change at Imperial College London.
"These heatwaves are not only more frequent, but also hotter and longer than they would have been without global warming," she says.
Experts are already predicting that the developing El Niño is likely to make 2023 the world's hottest year.
They fear it is likely to temporarily push the world past a key 1.5C warming milestone.
And that is just the start. Unless we make dramatic reductions to greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will continue to rise.
The Met Office said this week that record June temperatures this year were made twice as likely because of man-made climate change.
These rising temperatures are already driving fundamental and almost certainly irreversible changes in ecosystems across the world.
The record June temperatures in the UK helped cause unprecedented deaths of fish in rivers and canals, for example.
We cannot know what impact the current marine heatwave will have on the UK, cautions Prof NAME_2 of the University of Bristol, because we have never seen one this intense before.
"In other regions, around Australia, in the Mediterranean, entire ecosystems changed, kelp forests disappeared, and seabirds and whales starved," she says.
The world is effectively in a race.
It is clear we are speeding towards an ever hotter and more chaotic climate future, but we do have the technologies and tools to cut our emissions.
The question now is whether we can do so rapidly enough to slow the climate juggernaut and keep the impacts of global warming within manageable boundaries. In your response, include at most 12 words that are fully capitalized to emphasize key points.
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