Last year was the third hottest on record, according to an analysis of temperature data released Wednesday by three independent agencies. That puts 2025 just behind the second-hottest year, 2023, and the hottest, 2024.<\/p>\n
What makes this result extraordinary, scientists say, is that 2025 saw a cooling phase in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, or La Ni\u00f1a, that suppresses global temperatures. In other words: Heat from greenhouse gases countered that cooling influence enough that the year still landed among the very warmest.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s more evidence that \u201chuman-caused warming is now really overwhelming inter-annual natural variability\u201d in weather, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist in the University of California\u2019s Agriculture and Natural Resources division.<\/p>\n
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The notable 2025 heat is in line with what many scientists say is a recent acceleration of global warming. \u201cThe warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration,\u201d wrote researchers with Berkeley Earth, a scientific nonprofit that maintains one of the temperature databases.<\/p>\n
Several factors are likely contributing to the acceleration, they wrote, including declines in reflective low-hanging clouds and in sulfur pollution from shipping that has a cooling effect.<\/p>\n
The EU\u2019s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the UK Met Office and Berkeley Earth found that 2025 was hotter than the 1850-1900 average by 1.47 \u00b0C, 1.41 \u00b0C, and 1.44 \u00b0C, respectively.<\/p>\n
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According to Copernicus, the three-year warming average is now for the first time above 1.5C \u2013 the threshold that countries pledged not to breach in the 2015 Paris Agreement.\u00a0 The group estimates that the world might fully surpass the 1.5C mark by mid-2029, 13 years sooner than was projected when countries signed the pact. (Exceeding the Paris limit itself doesn\u2019t mark a step-change in worsening climate impacts; it\u2019s more of a diplomatic target.)<\/p>\n
Last year was only technically warmer than 2023 in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s data, leaving the two years tied as second-hottest. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found 2025 to be very slightly cooler than 2023 but\u00a0noted the upper ocean (the top 700 meters) was hotter than in any previous year on record. The marginal variations between datasets reflect methodology differences among the research groups.<\/p>\n
Humans burning fossil fuels is the overwhelming cause of global warming and provides a long-term push on the planet\u2019s temperature. Because worldwide emissions continue to rise, the past 11 years have all been among the 11 hottest, and the hottest 25 years have all occurred since 1998.<\/p>\n
At least half the globe\u2019s land in 2025 faced a higher-than-average number of heat-stress days, or conditions that feel like at least 32C (90F). Greenland warmed in May more than 12C above average in some places. The ice there melted 12 times faster than usual on May 19.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nThe Tanbreez rare-earth minerals site, a fjord near Narsarsuaq in Greenland, on 5 May, 2025. The island\u2019s rapid warming has intensified competition for its resources. Image: Bloomberg\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The extra heat makes extreme weather worse. Wildfires in Los Angeles in January killed more than 30 people and contributed to some 400 further fatalities, and the area saw $40 billion in insured losses alone. Climate change made the fire weather 35% more likely, according to World Weather Attribution, a scientific group that analyses weather events shortly after they occur to determine the role that climate change may have played.<\/p>\n
Year to year, fluctuations in the average temperature reflect short-term weather conditions as much as climate change. The presence of a warming El Ni\u00f1o or cooling La Ni\u00f1a phase in the equatorial Pacific Ocean is usually the controlling factor in where any year ranks among the most recent several.<\/p>\n
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Given that the Pacific last year was either in a neutral phase or slightly tilted toward La Ni\u00f1a, 2025 was hot. It was only negligibly cooler than 2023, a year that saw an El Ni\u00f1o emerge in the summer. In fact, last year was hotter than every El Ni\u00f1o year before 2023.<\/p>\n
Lower temperatures in the tropics offset surging heat elsewhere in 2025. It was Antarctica\u2019s hottest-ever year and the second hottest for the Arctic. February set a new record low for global sea ice, according to Copernicus.<\/p>\n
Total precipitation was more or less average, a fact that belies destructive flooding in many parts of the world.<\/p>\n
In central Texas in early July, flash flooding killed more than 135 people, including 27 children and counsellors at Camp Mystic in Kerr County. Pakistan saw a near-repeat of its deadly 2022 floods during its monsoon season. More than 1,750 people perished in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand in late November, when three cyclones engulfed a region not known for them.<\/p>\n
Jamaicans, accustomed to hurricanes, watched Melissa approach in early October. It rapidly intensified into a Category 5 storm with the strongest wind gust ever measured \u2014 252 miles per hour. Melissa did $8.8 billion of damage to the island, or 41% of its 2024 GDP, and claimed more than 100 lives across Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf such a storm just hits you face-on, there is just not much that you can do,\u201d said Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution. Greenhouse gas pollution is making storms more powerful and\u00a0\u201cthe change in intensity really makes a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
WWA found that climate change made the high ocean temperatures\u00a0that fueled\u00a0Melissa about six times more likely.<\/p>\n
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Berkeley Earth expects a 2026 global average temperature similar to last year\u2019s, ranking perhaps 4th on record, with the current La Ni\u00f1a giving way to a neutral phase. It\u2019s too early to predict the next El Ni\u00f1o, which \u2014 when it comes \u2014 now usually\u00a0brings a new global temperature record, too.<\/p>\n
The 2025 heat analysis comes after the US, long the world\u2019s anchor of climate science and diplomacy, has moved to abandon that role. The administration has dismissed hundreds of scientists, removed authoritative reports and risk tools from the internet and earlier this month pledged to exit both the foundational 1992 UN climate treaty and the UN\u2019s scientific advisory, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.<\/p>\n
The IPCC has been \u201csingularly effective\u201d\u00a0in documenting climate change and alerting governments about it, said Benjamin Santer,\u00a0a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, a former researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a contributor to all six IPCC climate reports. Santer said the US retreat from it\u00a0was \u201cnot in the best interests\u201d of the country.<\/p>\n
Florian Pappenberger is director general of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which operates Copernicus. \u201cData and observations are\u00a0essential to our efforts to confront climate change and air-quality challenges,\u201d he said, \u201cand these challenges don\u2019t know any borders.\u201d Pappenberger called the Trump\u00a0administration\u2019s stance toward climate data\u00a0\u201cconcerning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite wild growth in clean-energy technologies, greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high and the world consequently is choosing to remain on \u201ca very bad climate trajectory,\u201d Swain said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe still have the ability to manage this, but we\u2019re not managing it,\u201d he said. A\u00a0\u201cperiod of global cooperation, for many different types of things, seems to have at least for now ended.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2026 Bloomberg<\/p>\n
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