2025 third hottest year on record; relief unlikely in 2026

2025 third hottest year on record; relief unlikely in 2026

Earth logged its third-hottest year on record in 2025, extending a run of unprecedented heat, with no relief expected in 2026, United States researchers and European Union climate monitors said on Wednesday.

The last 11 years have now been the warmest ever recorded, with 2024 topping the podium and 2023 in second place, said the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and Berkeley Earth, a California-based nonprofit research organization.

For the first time, global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times on average over the last three years, Copernicus said in its annual report.

“The warming spike observed from 2023 to 2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” Berkeley Earth said in a separate report.

The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement commits the world to limiting warming to well below 2 C and pursuing efforts to hold it at 1.5 C — a long-term target scientists say would help avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned in October that breaching 1.5 C was “inevitable,” but the world could limit this period of overshoot by cutting greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.

Copernicus said the 1.5 C limit “could be reached by the end of this decade — over a decade earlier than predicted.”

But efforts to contain global warming were dealt another setback last week as President Donald Trump said he would pull the US — the world’s second-biggest polluter after China — out of the bedrock UN climate treaty.

Temperatures were 1.47 C above pre-industrial times in 2025 — just a fraction cooler than in 2023 — following 1.6 C in 2024, said the EU climate monitor.

Some 770 million people experienced record-warm annual conditions where they live, while no record-cold annual average was logged anywhere, Berkeley Earth said.

The Antarctic experienced its warmest year on record, while it was the second hottest in the Arctic, Copernicus said.

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