WITH the icy conditions on the roads today and snow blanketing other parts of the country, balmy summer temperatures seem like a distant memory.
But while wintry weather grips the country, forecasters have revealed that 2014 is set to be the warmest year in history.
Records dating back to the 17th century indicate that, so far, Britain has been a tenth of a degree hotter this year than in any other for more than 400 hundred years.
The Met Office has attributed the change to global warming.
Official confirmation of the record cannot be given until the end of the year.
While no one month has seen a record temperature, a slight increase on average throughout the year has contributed to the data.
A Met Office statement said: "One warm year does not necessarily say anything about long-term climate change. Trends need to be looked at over longer timescales of several decades.
"But new research techniques allow for assessment of how human influence might have affected the chances of breaking temperature records.
"This technique, known as an attribution study, uses climate models and observations to see how likely an event would be in the real world and in a world without human greenhouse gas emissions – enabling assessment of how human influence has altered the chances of an event."
