The unprecedented temperatures in the UK and bushfires raging across much of Europe should be a stern warning to Australians about the danger that looms ahead, an environmental expert has warned.

A temperature of more than 40 degrees was recorded for the first time in Britain on Tuesday, sparking several large fires to break out across London.

The extreme heat has also ignited massive wildfires in France, Italy and Spain.

Although Australia is no stranger to heatwaves — which kill more of us than all other natural disasters combined — the records being broken in the UK are a grim prediction of what’s to come, according to Dr Sharon Campbell, postdoctoral research fellow at the Environmental Health Research Unit from the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania.

“What does this mean for Australia? While the UK prepares for 40C, Australia needs to actively prepare for 50C in major population centres like western Sydney,” she warned.

“This takes government leadership and community understanding. In Australia we have seen a shift to greater recognition of these risks with a recent change in federal government.

“This needs to be urgently followed by greater investment in research, adaptation initiatives and education. Alongside these efforts, there must be an immediate and exceptional reduction in emissions to reduce the future burden.”

Dr Campbell said it has only been two years since researchers in the UK pondered if 40 degree temperatures were possible.

“[Now] we see an unfolding heatwave and health disaster playing out before our eyes,” she said.

“Driven by human-induced climate change, extreme and record-breaking temperatures have hit Australia, the United States and now Europe across successive summers.

“A perfect storm of social, cultural and political factors combine to make this event a human and environmental disaster.”

Australia may be ‘a different world’ by 2050

Over the next two decades, record-breaking heat and extreme weather like bushfires, drought and storms are expected to disrupt society in Australia as the world continues to warm.

Sydney’s western suburbs are predicted to see a five-fold increase in days above 35 degrees by 2050, according to modelling from the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology that was released earlier this year.

Penrith will cop the worst of it, with 58 days a year anticipated to exceed 35.

But in much of the central United States, summer 1936 was even hotter. At their peak, temperatures in North Dakota were warmer than midsummer Death Valley, and hot enough to cook rare steak in the street.

Few residents struggling in those temperatures would have been able to afford such a meal: The heat wave struck during the Great Depression, six years into a sustained period of crop failure and economic hardship.

The North American heat wave of 1936 followed one of the coldest recorded winters in the same area.

In North Dakota, February temperatures at Devil’s Lake plunged to minus-21 degrees. Channel ice in the Illinois River at Peoria grew 19 inches thick. The Chesapeake Bay froze entirely, something that has happened only seven times since 1780. Schools closed in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains and the Midwest, with rural schools in Cottonwood County, Minn., losing almost a month of class time.

Livestock were freezing to death, and pedestrians were regularly experiencing hypothermia and frostbite. Snowdrifts in Pierson, Iowa, swallowed whole locomotives, interrupting deliveries and depleting food stocks,

In 2015, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia determined that the 1936 heat wave was born of the ocean: specifically, high surface sea temperatures. Areas of the Pacific from the Gulf of Alaska to Los Angeles had warmed in tandem with the Bay of Fundy between Maine and Nova Scotia.

If the conditions of the 1936 heat wave were to take place now, the result would likely be far more severe. “Should this ocean warming reoccur in exactly the same constellation,” Donat said in 2015, “because of climate change it is likely the temperature impacts would be even more devastating and those old records may be surpassed.”