Sixteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Communication about climate status often refers to the statistic of a global temperature rise of 1.1C. The use and presentation of this specific value is proposed as being difficult to interpret by the public and politicians due to numeric anxiety and effect size categorisation. An alternative communication approach using the degree-hours method is developed in this paper. The degree-hours method has previously been used to produce estimates of cold-season heating requirements in various cities around the world. In this paper, the degree-hours method is applied to the HadCET data set from 1841 to 2020 to show a 9000 degree-hour increase in the England climate status and to provide a new statistic for thermal change communication.