Climate extremes increasingly 'normal' in Britain, says Met Office

STORY: :: London, England :: A UK climate report's lead author says extreme temperatures are 'increasingly becoming more normal' :: Exeter, England / July 14, 2026 :: Mike Kendon, Lead author of the State of the UK Climate report "So what used to be really extreme is increasingly becoming more normal. And what used to be normal is actually now becoming cold. Just to comment on the number of days above 30 degrees in the UK. It's worth remembering that in the 20th century, one in five years, we didn't reach 30 degrees anywhere in the UK all year. That might seem quite surprising now, but that is what the observations tell us." :: The report found that 2025 was Britain's warmest year since records began in 1884 "So the observations from weather stations throughout the UK are really telling us that the climate of the 20th century has now gone. So we have long-term records for the UK that extend all the way back to Victorian times. When we look at the observations for the year just gone and for the most recent decade, what we can see is our climate is substantially different to how the climate was through much of the 20th century." Britain's Met Office said 2025 was the sixth time this century that Britain's annual temperature record had been broken. The agency said it would expect records to be broken again within years, and Kendon said the evidence showed that the climate of the last century was no more. The findings come after a succession of heatwaves across Britain and Europe this year that have shattered temperature records, fueled wildfires, and led to thousands of so-called excess deaths.

STORY: :: London, England:: A UK climate report's lead