BRUSSELS, Jan 14 — The planet experienced its third-warmest year on record last year, and average temperatures have exceeded 1.5ºC of global warming over three years, the longest period since records began, European Union scientists said today.
The data from the EU’s European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) found that the last three years were the planet’s three hottest since records began — with 2025 marginally cooler than 2023, by just 0.01ºC.
Britain’s national weather service, the UK Met Office, confirmed its own data ranked 2025 as the third-warmest in records going back to 1850. The World Meteorological Organisation will publish its temperature figures later today.
The hottest year on record was 2024.
Extreme weather events
ECMWF said the planet also just had its first three-year period in which the average global temperature was 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial era — the limit beyond which scientists expect global warming will unleash severe impacts, some of them irreversible.
“1.5ºC is not a cliff edge. However, we know that every fraction of a degree matters, particularly for worsening extreme weather events,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at ECMWF.
Governments pledged under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to avoid exceeding 1.5ºC of global warming, measured as a decades-long average temperature compared with the pre-industrial era.
But their failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions means that level could now be breached before 2030 — a decade earlier than had been predicted when the Paris accord was signed in 2015, ECMWF said.
“We are bound to pass it,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems.”
Political pushback
Currently, the world’s long-term warming level is about 1.4ºC above the pre-industrial era, ECMWF said. Measured on a short-term basis, the world already breached 1.5ºC in 2024.
Exceeding the long-term 1.5ºC limit — even if only temporarily — would lead to more extreme and widespread impacts, including hotter and longer heatwaves, and more powerful storms and floods.
Last year, wildfires in Europe produced the highest total emissions on record, while scientific studies confirmed specific weather events were made worse by climate change — including Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and monsoon rains in Pakistan that killed more than 1,000 people in floods.
Despite these worsening impacts, climate science is facing increased political pushback. United States President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “the greatest con job”, last week withdrew from dozens of United Nations entities, including the scientific Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The long-established consensus among the world’s scientists is that climate change is real, mostly caused by humans, and getting worse. Its main cause is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, which trap heat in the atmosphere.
