The past couple of years have set worryingly high temperature records, but was the extraordinary global heat of 2023 and 2024 just a freak event down to natural variability, rather than a sign of something more worrying? Some climate scientists think so.

“From a model perspective, yes, it’s variability that we expect,” Karsten Haustein at Leipzig University in Germany told a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna last week.