How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods BBC5 November 2025 Mark PoyntingClimate reporter, BBC News Many extreme weather events are becoming more common and more intense around the world, fuelled by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels. Here are four ways that rising temperatures are affecting weather extremes.1. Hotter, longer heat waves Even a small increase in average temperatures makes a big difference to heat extremes. As the range of daily temperatures shifts to warmer levels, hotter days become more likely and more intense. Scientists use computer models to simulate how individual extreme weather events unfold in two scenarios.......today's world with about 1.3C or more of human-caused warming.........a hypothetical world without human influence on the climate. That way, they can estimate how much a particular heatwave, storm or drought was affected by climate change. In the UK, temperatures topped 40C for the first time on record in July 2022, causing extensive disruption.This would have been extremely unlikely without climate change, according to scientists at the World Weather Attribution group (WWA). In June 2025, the Met Office said the chance of seeing temperatures above 40C was now more than 20 times greater than during than 1960s. And the likelihood of reaching such temperatures will continue to rise as the world warms, it said.One theory suggests that higher temperatures in the Arctic - which has warmed nearly four times faster than the global average - are affecting the fast band of winds high in the atmosphere known as the jet stream. That could be making heat domes more likely, although this is not clear cut.