UK climate: ‘Not just a record of change but a call to action’
By the Climate Centre
The new State of the UK Climate in 2024 report shows how “baselines are shifting, records are becoming more frequent, and … temperature and rainfall extremes are becoming the norm,” the British Met Office said today.
The report highlights how the UK’s climate has, with individual cooler years, warmed steadily overall from the 1980s, with “the greatest implications from the increasing frequency and intensity of daily temperature extremes.”
The last three years have been in the UK’s top five warmest on record, with 2024 the fourth warmest in records dating back to 1884; 2024 saw the UK’s second warmest February, its warmest May, its fifth warmest December, its fifth warmest winter, and its warmest spring.
Some of these records have already been surpassed in 2025, the Met Office said in a press release today introducing the report, published in the International Journal of Climatology.
The Central England Temperature series shows that recent warming has “far exceeded any observed temperatures in at least 300 years,” the Met Office adds.
The report examines in detail the frequency and intensity of heat and rainfall extremes.
The number of days 10°C above the 1961–90 average has quadrupled over the past decade; rainfall is more variable, but the months in the past decade when counties recorded rainfall at least twice the average has increased by over 50 per cent compared to the same baseline.
‘Extreme heat, intense rainfall and droughts have the most dramatic effects
on people and nature’
Met Office climate scientist and lead author of the 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.”
He continued: “This pace of change and clustering of consecutive records is not a natural variation in our climate. Numerous studies have shown how human emissions of greenhouse gasses are warming the atmosphere and changing the weather we experience on the ground.”
As in recent years, floods and storms brought the worst severe weather impacts to the UK in 2024. There was widespread flooding in early January associated with storms starting the previous autumn, including Babet, Ciarán, Debi, Elin, Fergus, Gerrit, Henk, Isha and Jocelyn; October 2023 to March 2024 was the wettest winter on record for England and Wales in at least 250 years.
The Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, Professor Liz Bentley, said “it is the extreme heat, intense rainfall and droughts that are having the most immediate and dramatic effects on people and nature. This report is not just a record of change but a call to action.”
‘Ultimately in an emergency, we are all
each other’s first responders’
British Red Cross teams are responding to an increasing number of climate-related emergencies across the UK and see first-hand the devastating impact extreme weather has on communities, the National Society said today in a statement responding to the new climate report.
Its Director of Policy, Mubeen Bhutta, highlighted three priorities, starting with “clear and accessible information on what to do before, during and after emergencies such as flooding and heatwaves”; also, information and support for adaptation in private homes.
Thirdly, she added, “there needs to be clear recognition that climate-related emergencies aren’t ‘one size fits all’. If you live in a coastal area, or you’re on a zero-hours contract, or you’re a carer, a flood or power cut will hit differently.
“Ultimately in an emergency, we are all each other’s first responders – it’s vital that people are warned, fully prepared and ready to take action.”
Climate centre science lead Liz Stephens said today: “This report shows how our climate has shifted over our lifetimes, but what we have to remember is that this is actually not the ‘new normal’.
In other words, our climate will continue to change: our summers will get hotter and our winters will continue to get wetter.”
In one of the three heatwaves the UK has experienced this year, British Red Cross volunteers handed out drinking water to people heading to popular Ayr beach in Scotland, where people are unused to extreme heat. Scotland saw 32°C last week – only the sixth time that temperature has been recorded there since 1961. (Photo: BRC)