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By Eric Roston
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.
What makes this
result extraordinary, scientists say, is that
2025 saw a cooling phase in the equatorial
Pacific Ocean, or La Niña,
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.
It’s more evidence
that “human-caused warming is now really
overwhelming inter-annual natural variability”
in weather, said Daniel Swain, a climate
scientist in the University of California’s
Agriculture and Natural Resources division.
The notable 2025
heat is in line with what many scientists say is
a recent speeding
up of the pace of global warming. “The
warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been
extreme, and suggests an acceleration,” wrote
researchers with Berkeley Earth, a scientific
nonprofit that maintains one of the temperature
databases.
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.
The EU’s Copernicus
Climate Change Service, the UK Met Office and
Berkeley Earth found that 2025 was hotter than
the 1850-1900 average by 1.47C, 1.41C and 1.44C,
respectively.
A
pedestrian uses a hand fan during a heat wave
in Barcelona, Spain Photographer: Angel
Garcia/Bloomberg
According to
Copernicus, the three-year warming average is
now for the first time above 1.5C — the
threshold that countries pledged not to breach
in the 2015 Paris Agreement. 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.
The 2025 heat
analysis comes after the US, long the world’s
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’s scientific advisory,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Florian
Pappenberger is director general of the European
Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which
operates Copernicus. “Data and observations are
essential to our efforts to confront climate
change and air-quality challenges,” he said,
“and these challenges don’t know any borders.”
Pappenberger called the Trump administration’s
stance toward climate data “concerning.”
Firefighters
battle flames during the Palisades Fire in the
US Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg
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 “a very
bad climate trajectory,” Swain said.
“Major economies
that refuse to act are putting their own
economic security in jeopardy,” said Helen
Clarkson, chief executive officer at non-profit
Climate Group. “Energy and food security, the
ability to insure our homes, economic
productivity — it’s all at risk.”
Read the full
story, including what might be in store
for 2026.
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