If we did just take 1.5c off, then we'd have had 32c occured in 4 consecutive months. a June peak of 36.5c (above the exceptional 1976 with it's partial climate change effect) and a May peak of 33.6c.

Of course the butterfly effect of meteorology means that without climate change this would not have happened at all, but is this a theoretical maximum year on it's own, combined with climate change to make it even more extreme?

The UK has warmed by 1.3c in the last 50 years, and nearer 2c since pre-industrial times.

As for not seeing this summer repeated for several decades, I’m not sure that’s correct.  With a likely record breaking El Niño building now 2027 is likely to be a new record warm year globally and NW Europe is unlikely to avoid the impacts.

If you look at what’s happening around the world we seem to have succeeded in destabilising the global climate.

I posted an analysis a few weeks ago and IIRC summer max's in London have increased by about 3 to 3.5C in the last 60-70 years as a linear trend

Overall summer rainfall hasn’t shown a meaningful long term trend up or down, although projections do suggest it should reduce in summer by the 2050s. 

But has the extra heat, with more rapid desiccation of soils and green surfaces than under the same Synoptics pre-warming, led to lower rainfall? And less cloud. The physics would suggest it should, so long as the atmosphere is summery ie quasi-barotropic, rather than baroclinic.

And i also posted about a study done in part with the met office regarding this. It's linked with the cleaner air since.

The gap between hot Julys (CET 18°C +) has also been consistently shrinking in the last 30 years - after 1995, 11 years to 2006, 7 to 2013, 5 to 2018, 4 to 2022, 3 to 2025, and 1 to this year.

I recognise 1994 also was hot, an anomalous double act, and there was 1989, 1983 and 1976 but you have to go back to 1934 to see it again. Prior to that it's just 1921, 1911, and 1901 in the 20th century.

If we summarise by half-century, 1800-1849 had 2 such months, 1850-1899 had 3, 1900-1949 had 4, 1950 to 1999 had 6, 2000 to now (only a quarter century) already 6. The bigger picture helps remove what I consider to be anomalies to the overall pattern, (1983 1989 and 1994 or 1995)

Apol,ogies for the long-winded reply but I just wanted to clarify my thoughts as to why I don't belive this is simply an anomalous year- unlike 1976, which could have been.

Yes, cleaner air is allowing more of the sun’s energy to reach the surface, but the increase in greenhouse gases is the primary cause.

CO2 is up over 50% on pre-industrial levels now, and almost 30% since 1976.

That's not what the study says. The reason that Europe is warming far faster than the rest of the world is not because of greenhouse gases but because of the cleaner air with less sulphur. This is allowing more sunlight as you say to get to the ground which creates higher temperatures, but it is also having an effect with regional weather patterns increasing the likelihood of higher pressure over the region. A reminder this was a Met office backed study.

I would be astonished if any study discounted the effects of CO2, since it is clearly a factor.  If it wasn’t, why wasn’t Europe this hot before the Industrial Revolution, when the air was last this clean?

I can't remember if you posted a link to the study before, but why not include one here? It could be helpful. Without it there is an element of the blind leading the blind, and the discussion will quickly nosedive. 

The study didn't disregard CO2 warming it was looking at why Europe has warmed some 2.5-3C above what the climate change predictions were saying & and faster than on a global scale.

Also we were still exiting a mini ice age around the beginning of the industrial revolution.. Although in reality we are still exiting the last great ice age.

Here it is.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2026GL122424?utm_source=chatgpt.com 

I did see that when you first posted it and it was bound to be a bit controversial as it upset the usual narrative of Greenhouse gases being the only driver in rising temps.

 This summarising point is important and shows how much more there is to understand in the atmosphere,

Models underestimate the magnitude of these changes, showing signal-to-noise errors in the atmospheric circulation responses.

Global warming is typically measured against the pre industrial mean. Pre-industrial skies (and they are generally talking early 19th century) were as clean (probably cleaner) than now. So if you take a linear trend from then to now, that’s your climate change signal.

Then layer in SO2. That slows, or even in some areas reverses, warming in the mid to late 20th century. In other words it masks the underlying trend. Meaning there’s a faster warming rate from the 1980s to now in areas that have cleaned up the most. This study also suggests that regional circulation changes play a part too - in other words aerosol emissions altered the late 20th C circulation in ways that exacerbated cooling, and those effects have now reversed. 

But take the counterfactual of no historical SO2 impact, and today’s absolute temperature would be the same. Nobody is suggesting that adding SO2 then removing it again leaves Europe hotter than if it had never been added in the first place.

Sadly predictable that you should pop in to misrepresent what people are saying.  The real controversy centres around people like you still trying to deny climate change, despite the growing evidence.

Thanks, an interesting read. I’ll try to find time to read it thoroughly.

That becomes a personal post attack Gandalf. Brian closed the climate forum some years ago to stop this kind of comment- if the forum had remained objective and impersonal it might I imagine have remained active.

Noone with any sense of reality can deny the effects of climate change on what is happening, including the MetO; but keep it managed. 

Your definition of 'climate change denier' is someone who doesn't follow your extremely narrow worldview of it to the letter. 

1700's onward industrial revolution. However coal was being used as the primary source of heating in from the 1600's - at least in the UK.

I don’t have an ‘extremely narrow view’, I follow the science. You could always try doing that, of course.

It wasn’t, Bert. How is ‘pop in’ a personal attack?  I’m puzzled by your interpretation.

I think I'd have enjoyed this summer if I lived in the northwest rather than the southeast, where the crops and gardens are burnt up and many nights have been unpleasantly hot for sleeping.

Remember, I had direct experience of this in 1976 when for several weeks I was doing a weekend commute between Manchester and Mid-Kent. In Manchester it was comfortable shirtsleeve weather and the countryside was green; in Kent it was uncomfortably hot and the countryside was brown with water restrictions in place. Just like this year; take a heatwave break on the south coast to experience it for youself!

Robert Maxwell likes this post.

No, the pre-industrial baseline used in climate science and IPCC reports is 1850-1900. 

That’s not “pre-industrial revolution” of course, but it’s considered a suitable reference period before emissions were significant enough to have a meaningful impact on global atmospheric concentrations, and - practically - when instrumentation and record keeping were reliable enough not to need to use proxies.