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Britain will regularly be crippled by heatwaves and floods this century, the first results of the world's biggest climate prediction experiment show.
The experiment by the BBC and Oxford University began in February last year with an appeal for people to download a climate prediction programme which would run in the background when their computers were idle.
About 200,000 people from across the world signed up and 50,000 have now run the programme - which plots the global climate from 1920 to 2080 - long enough for the results to be statistically significant.
Each programme was slightly different so that a broad range of possible outcomes was covered.
"This is not a worst-case scenario," said project co-ordinator Nick Faull of Oxford University. "This is what we are increasingly confident will happen in the absence of substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions."
The initial results will be presented by broadcaster David Attenborough in a BBC programme, Climate Change: Britain Under Threat, on Monday, giving snapshots of Britain in 2020, 2050 and 2080.
They show flooding will become widespread and regular and heatwaves, like the one that struck Europe in 2003, killing thousands, will become the norm, making conditions in millions of homes and London's creaking underground system unbearable.
- REUTERS
