While temperatures vary naturally from year to year, scientists could not be clearer that human-caused climate change is driving the UK’s rapidly warming trend.
By the end of 2025, the UK’s 10 warmest years on record will all have taken place in the last two decades, in measurements going back to the late 1800s.
“Anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change is causing the warming in the UK as it’s causing the warming across the world,” said Amy Doherty, a climate scientist at the Met Office.
“What we have seen in the past 40 years, and what we’re going to continue to see, is more records broken, more extremely hot years […] so what was normal 10 years ago, 20 years ago, will become [relatively] cool in the future,” she told BBC News.
The Met Office’s projection uses observed temperatures up to 21 December and assumes that the remaining days of the year follow the long-term December average.
As a result, the Met Office cannot say with certainty that 2025 will be the hottest year, but it is the most likely outcome.
It would be the sixth time this century that the UK has set a new annual temperature record, following 2002, 2003, 2006, 2014 and 2022.
“In terms of our climate, we are living in extraordinary times,” said Mike Kendon, also of the Met Office.
“The changes we are seeing are unprecedented in observational records back to the 19th Century,” he added.