Climate crisis: UK experiences hottest summer since 1884

The Met Office, the United Kingdom's meteorological service, has announced that the summer of 2026 has gone down in the record as the hottest summer in the country's history. According to Met Office data, the average temperature for the summer season spanning June to August came in at 16.5°C. That value is the highest level registered in the systematic temperature records kept continuously since 1884.

The Met Office has also published an attribution analysis looking at the role of climate change behind this record heat. According to the analysis, had human-caused climate change not been a factor, extreme temperatures of the kind seen in the summer of 2026 would have been 130 times less likely to occur. The striking ratio was presented as a statistical measure of how much the climate crisis has made heatwaves a more probable event.

The character of the record: seasonal persistence

What distinguishes the summer of 2026 from earlier record years is that the heat spread across the full season. Met Office data shows June 2026 was the hottest June since 1884, meaning the summer stood at record levels from the very start. The season's highest temperature was recorded on 13 August at the Kew Gardens measuring station in London, at 38.1°C.

Previous summer heat records in the United Kingdom belonged to the summers of 2022, 2018 and 1976. In the summer of 2022, the 40°C mark was crossed for the first time on record, and the highest daily temperature in the country's history was registered. The summer of 2026, by contrast, stands male who — not so much for the extreme heat of a single day; as for the persistence of the seasonal average.