The annual State of the UK Climate report from the UK’s Met Office, published today, highlighted that temperature and rainfall extremes are now becoming ‘the norm’, as the shifting baseline changes the frequency of these events. The report noted that the “UK climate has been warming at a rate of approximately 0.25°C per decade and that the last three years have all been in the UK’s top five warmest on record.”
The report warned that: “extreme weather events are to be expected each year as an integral part of the UK’s climate”.This finding alone highlights how unprepared the UK still is in adapting to the climate crisis, as heatwaves, flooding and wildfires become more frequent. The findings of the report also evidence the contrast in the UK climate with previous decades, stating that “the most recent decade 2015–2024 has been 0.41°C warmer than 1991–2020 and 1.24°C warmer than 1961–1990”.
Annual mean temperature for the UK, 1884 to 2024
Comparing the number of days per year in which the highest maximum temperature for each count has exceeded 28°C evidences the strong contrast between 1931–1960 and 2015–2024.
‘Humans are warming the atmosphere’
Met Office climate scientist and lead author of the State of the UK Climate report, Mike Kendon, said: “Every year that goes by is another upward step on the warming trajectory our climate is on. Observations show that our climate in the UK is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago. We are now seeing records being broken very frequently as we see temperature and rainfall extremes being the most affected by our changing climate … Our climate in the UK is now different to what it was just a few decades ago, this is clear from our observations.”
Using the Central England Temperature (CET) series, the world’s longest continuous instrumental temperature record based on over 350 years of observations, scientists were able to evidence that “The 21st century so far has overall been warmer than any period of equivalent length within the previous three centuries; 2001 to 2024 has been 1.0°C warmer than 1901–2000 and 1.3°C warmer than 1801–1900 and 1701–1800.”
‘Radical truth-telling’ about the climate crisis
The secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Ed Miliband, addressed the findings of the State of the Climate Report today (14 July 2025) in the House of Commons, in a ‘State of the Climate’ speech. He said, “The science is unequivocal about why this is happening. As the Met Office said this morning and I quote, ‘This is not a natural variation in our climate – human emissions of greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere and changing the weather we experience’.” He continued, “The impact of extreme weather and nature loss aren’t simply a future threat to our country, they are already here and having impacts on our way of life.”
In concluding, Miliband challenged climate sceptics and deniers by saying, “We must act on the climate and nature crisis to protect our British way of life, because no sector or part of our society is immune from these risks. This is just the start to the threat we face.”
And in thinly veiled targeted comments to net-zero sceptics, he said, “To those who doubt whether Britain can have any impact on the pathway of global emissions, the lesson of history is that we can. The lesson is clear – the choices we make as a country have influenced the course of global action. To those who say that Britain cannot make a difference, I say, you are wrong. Stop talking our country down. British leadership matters.”
Pushing back against anti-net-zero populism
With Reform UK Ltd pushing a platform of scrapping all net-zero measures and even senior Reform councillors calling human-caused global warming a ‘hoax’, it should be emphasised that these minority views contrast with almost every robust scientific organisation in the world.
Additionally, in an updated analysis in 2021, more than 99.9% of peer reviewed studies agreed that humans caused climate change. This finding even widened the terms to include more ‘sceptical papers’ than were found in the famous 2013 publication by Cook et al, which found that 97% of the world’s science supported the climate change consensus.
The UK government itself states: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land. Measurements of the average temperature at the Earth’s surface show it has risen by about 1.34 to 1.41°C since the pre-industrial period. Each of the last three decades have been hotter than the previous one and the last 10 years (2015–2024) were the warmest 10 years on record.”
Our responsibility to the future
Met Office chief scientist, Prof Stephen Belcher, said:
“We are experiencing more severe weather events in the UK due to climate change. They are a potent reminder of our responsibility to citizens now, and to future generations, to accelerate efforts to adapt our society and infrastructure to cope with these weather extremes. The climate is likely to continue to change, and so we need to prepare for the impacts that will have on the weather we experience on the ground.”
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