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A five-year-old fictitious weather report speculating on temperatures more than three decades in the future has resurfaced after social media realised the report has predicted the climate 31 years too soon.
The fake report was created in 2014 when French weather reporter Évelyne Dhéliat teamed up with the World Meteorological Organization to create a bulletin imagining how climate change would affect temperatures in 2050.
Five years later, a weather report by Ms Dhéliat showed almost identical temperatures to the fake report.
This side-by-side comparison shows the fictional report next to a true report from June 2019 -- which wasn't the hottest day in France so far this summer.
Europe's summer temperatures have smashed records with at least five reported deaths from temperatures. Germany recorded its highest ever temperature of 42.8 degrees this week, along with a 75-year-old record of 40.7 degrees smashed in the Netherlands.
Source: Supplied
The UK's national weather service Met Office said Britain has experienced the warmest 10 years on record.
"Observations since 1884 show UK's 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2002, whereas all 10 coldest years occurred prior to 1963."
The heat has reached Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island's ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic.
"On the northwestern Greenland ice sheet, 2019 melt to-date is 1.2 times that of the previous record melt in 2012," tweeted ice climatologist Professor Jason Box.
Greenland, the world's largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82 per cent of its surface covered in ice.
The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5 per cent for this year on Wednesday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute.
She says that's expected to expand and peak on Thursday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt.
More than 10 billion tons of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Wednesday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tons from Greenland in July, she said.
One billion tons of ice loss is equivalent to about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the Danish Meteorological Institute said . And 100 billion tons corresponds to a 0.28 mm rise in global sea levels.
The current melting has been brought on by the arrival of the same warm air from North Africa and Spain that melted European cities and towns last week, setting national temperature records in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Britain.
In Greenland, the melt area this year is the second-biggest in terms of ice area affected, behind more than 90 per cent in 2012.
A lot of what melts can later refreeze onto the ice sheet, but because of the conditions ahead of this summer's heat wave, the amount of ice lost for good this year might be the same as in 2012 or more, according to scientists.
The Feed with AP
