{"id":82727,"date":"2025-09-24T12:30:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T12:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/82727\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T12:30:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T12:30:12","slug":"unusually-high-night-time-temperatures-pushed-irelands-summer-to-record-high-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/82727\/","title":{"rendered":"Unusually high night-time temperatures pushed Ireland\u2019s summer to record high \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ireland was on course for an average summer this year but climate change<\/a> turned it into a record-breaker, scientists have found. <\/p>\n

The unusually high night-time temperatures that put June, July and August into the record books were made 40 times more likely by the distorting impacts of the heating planet. <\/p>\n

The average temperature, taking into account day and night over the three months, reached 16.19 degrees, beating the previous warmest in 1995, when the average was 16.11 degrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was quite a normal set-up \u2013 normal rainfall, normal sunshine \u2013 but it still led to us having the warmest summer on record,\u201d said Paul Moore, climatologist with Met \u00c9ireann<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The factors that fed into summer 2025\u2019s extraordinary heat all bore the hallmarks of a changing climate. <\/p>\n

An exceptionally dry winter and spring left soils parched so they lacked the moisture that would normally evaporate to create a cooling effect. <\/p>\n

Recurring marine heatwaves pushed sea surface temperatures to 3 degrees above normal, meaning breezes carried warmer air onshore and the waters were less effective in absorbing heat from the land. <\/p>\n

Multiple heat domes in Europe also meant extra warm air close to the country. <\/p>\n

The record heat persisted despite daytime temperatures being lower than during the previous warmest summers, 1976 and 1995, which were characterised by atypical prolonged dry, sunny, hot spells. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0August among hottest on record, continuing summer trendOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means we have reached a point where the background warming due to climate change can transform an otherwise average season into a record warm season,\u201d Mr Moore said. <\/p>\n

The analysis was conducted by the ICARUS centre at Maynooth University<\/a> and Met \u00c9ireann under the WASITUS (Weather Attribution Science Irish Operational User Service) project. <\/p>\n

WASITUS seeks to explain the role climate change plays in extreme weather events by establishing the likelihood of them happening in a pre-industrial world before rapid fuel expansion drove up global temperatures. <\/p>\n

The study found that climate change made the warm summer days nine times more likely and the warm summer nights 40 times more likely. <\/p>\n

Put another way, instead of being a one-in-600 year event, climate change made 2025\u2019s record summer a one-in-15 year occurrence that is set to become 300 times more likely, occurring once every two years, by the end of the century unless warming is halted. <\/p>\n

\u201cMean night-time temperatures at many of the weather stations were the warmest ever found,\u201d said Dr Claire Bergin of Maynooth University. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Unusually warm summer making work \u2018really hard\u2019 in hot restaurant kitchens, say chefsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the concerning part. The land isn\u2019t allowed to cool down at night-time in the way it would have been in previous summers.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sleepless nights resulted, which is bad for health and raises questions about how Irish homes can adapt. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur buildings are set to retain heat, so in terms of future planning of houses and retrofitting, there\u2019s a need to allow not just for insulation, but ventilation too,\u201d said Dr Bergin. <\/p>\n

Warm air also holds more moisture, producing much heavier, intense rainfall that leads to worse flooding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland was on course for an average summer this year but climate change turned it into a record-breaker,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[9,10,442,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,55206,5602,5,7,8,1102],"class_list":{"0":"post-82727","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-climate-change","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-maynooth-university","22":"tag-met-eireann","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-topstories","26":"tag-weather-events"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}