In a rapid attribution study - which looks at how much of a role climate change plays - the Met Office say the average temperature was made around 130 times more likely due to human-induced climate change.

And step back from this summer and there is clue to our changing climate in the temperature record itself.

In a climate that isn't changing, new records should become progressively rarer, because every time a record falls, it raises the bar for the next one.

Think about the 100m race. Each time someone sets a new record, it becomes harder to beat. And there's another thing. Typically records are only ever broken by a few fractions of a second – often just a millisecond or two.

In June 1991, for example, Leroy Burrell ran 9.90 seconds, beating Carl Lewis's 1988 world record of 9.92 seconds by just two hundredths of a second.

Now look at the UK summer temperature record. Until last year, the four hottest summers on record were separated by just five hundredths of a degree.

Then 2025 beat the previous record by 0.34C. And this summer has beaten that new record by another 0.40C.

So after years when the record moved by tiny fractions, in just two summers the bar has been raised by 0.74C.

Head of Climate Attribution at the Met Office, Dr Mark McCarthy said that summer 2026 was "remarkable" and we can expect to see extremes occurring more frequently in the future because of climate change.

So why is this happening so quickly here? The UK sits on the western edge of Europe, the fastest-warming continent on Earth - warming at roughly twice the global rate.

There are a few reasons for that. Land heats up faster than the oceans, parts of Europe stretch into the rapidly warming Arctic, and changes in weather patterns have favoured more frequent and intense summer heatwaves.

Scientists are still working out exactly how much each factor contributes, but the result is clear: the background climate in which British weather happens is getting warmer.

None of this means the UK will break its summer record every year. Weather will always give us cooler summers as well as hotter ones. But the pattern is becoming unmistakable: records that once marked the extreme edge of the UK's climate are being overtaken with remarkable speed.

So the question is not whether the UK will experience summers hotter than this one. It is how often they will come - and how much hotter they might be.