In 2025, the UK experienced what many described as a warm, pleasant, sunny year — one of the warmest and sunniest on record, according to the Met Office.

Skeptical analysts noted that the warmth stemmed largely from extended sunny periods, especially in spring and summer, rather than dramatic shifts. It was a year of reliable good weather, with temperatures reminiscent of past decades but boosted by abundant sunshine.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Predictably, the Met Office have just announced last year was the hottest and sunniest on record. Laughably, the year was supposedly 0.06C warmer than 2022.

No serious scientific organisation would claim accuracy to such a tiny margin, which says an awful lot about the Met Office’s credibility in these matters. Given the dreadful siting of nearly all the weather stations that make up their UK temperature dataset, they cannot possibly know the average UK temperature to within even a whole degree centigrade – eight out of ten stations are officially classified according to World Meteorological Organisation standards as having at least two degrees of artificial heating.

The Met Office do not bother showing margins of error in their press releases – they obviously think their data is perfect. But even just using 1C as a margin would demote 2025 to a rank of 30^th.

In any event, it is hardly a surprise that the year was so warm, given the fact that it was so sunny during the spring and summer. In fact, 2025 was considerably sunnier than any other year on record.

A Met Office study a few years ago found that there is strong correlation between sunshine hours and temperatures – the sunnier it is, the warmer it is. (I refuse, by the way, to use the term “hot”, as the UK climate is definitely not a hot one! The use of the term by the Met Office is deliberately intended to convey alarm.)

The Met Office has naturally jumped on the global warming bandwagon. Head of climate attribution at the Met Office, Dr Mark McCarthy, said:

“2025 was the warmest year on record for the UK, surpassing the previous record set in 2022, in a series dating back to 1884.

“We’re increasingly seeing UK temperatures break new ground in our changing climate, as demonstrated by a new highest UK mean temperature record just three years after the last record.

“This very warm year is in line with expected consequences of human-induced climate change. Although it doesn’t mean every year will be the warmest on record, it is clear from our weather observations and climate models that human-induced global warming is impacting the UK’s climate.”

CO2 emissions don’t make the weather sunnier. What has definitely increasedthe amount of sunshine we get nowadays is the massive reduction in air pollution in recent decades, the result of successive Clean Air Acts beginning in the 1950s.

I should also point out that “climate attribution” is not science and has been dismissed by scientific experts as alchemy. It is shameful that the Met Office is resorting to such gutter practices, in order to push its political agenda.

The real story of the year is summed up in the daily CET temperature data:

This chart plots the daily max temperatures, within the historical bands between 1961 and 1990. Warmer than average days dominated the year, but at no stage did temperatures go above the ceiling for the time of year.

In short, every day last year, we had the same weather and temperatures we had regularly decades ago. The year was warmer than average because of WEATHER not CLIMATE CHANGE.

As the chart indicates, most of the warmer days were during spring and summer, a direct result of the sunny weather.

The four charts below demonstrate that the highest temperature for each season were nowhere near being unprecedented. They also broadly show that the same for the last few years, with the exception of the 2022 “40C day” and the winter of 2015.

As similar monthly analyses have borne out, average temperatures have been pushed up in recent years by the relative absence of extreme cold weather.

A lot of nonsense is talked about climate anyway. It is often claimed that “climate” is the 30-year average of weather. But this is no more than an arithmetical convenience. Why not 500 years, or 1000?

The UK’s climate is not an arithmetic formula; it is officially classified according to the Koppen system, as “temperate oceanic”, characterized by mild temperatures year-round, moderate to high rainfall, frequent cloud cover, and changeable weather influenced by the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream.

Interestingly, Scotland has exactly the same climate as England, despite the fact that it is colder and wetter on average. It is untrue, therefore, that British climate is “changing”, as McCarthy claims.

But the Met Office, of course, have to maintain the fiction of a “changing climate”. A message that says our weather is now a bit more pleasant and milder than it used to be, without the horrifically cold winters of the past, is hardly likely to persuade the public to back Net Zero.