Earth logged its third-hottest year on record last year, extending a run of unprecedented heat, with no relief expected this year, US researchers and EU climate monitors said yesterday.
The past 11 years have been the warmest ever recorded, with 2024 topping the podium and 2023 in second place, according to 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°C relative to preindustrial times on average over the past three years, Copernicus said in its annual report.
Photo: AP
“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.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in October warned 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.
The 1.5°C limit “could be reached by the end of this decade — over a decade earlier than predicted,” Copernicus said.
However, efforts to contain global warming were dealt another setback last week when US 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 preindustrial times last year — just a fraction cooler than in 2023 — following 1.6°C in 2024, the EU climate monitor said.
About 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.
An analysis of Copernicus data last month found that Central Asia, the Sahel region and northern Europe experienced their hottest year on record last year.
Berkeley and Copernicus both warned that this year would not break the trend.
If the warming El Nino weather phenomenon appears this year, “this could make 2026 another record-breaking year,” Copernicus Climate Change Service director Carlo Buontempo said.
“Temperatures are going up. So we are bound to see new records. Whether it will be 2026, 2027, 2028 doesn’t matter too much. The direction of travel is very, very clear,” Buontempo said.
Berkeley Earth said it expected this year to be similar to last year, “with the most likely outcome being approximately the fourth-warmest year since 1850.”
The reports come as efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the main driver of climate change — are stalling in developed countries.
Emissions rose in the US last year, snapping a two-year streak of declines, as bitter winters and an artificial intelligence boom fueled demand for energy, the Rhodium Group think tank said on Tuesday.
The pace of reductions of greenhouse gas emissions slowed in Germany and France.
“While greenhouse gas emissions remain the dominant driver of global warming, the magnitude of this recent spike suggests additional factors have amplified recent warming beyond what we would expect from greenhouse gases and natural variability alone,” Berkeley Earth chief scientist Robert Rohde said.
International rules cutting sulfur in ship fuel since 2020 might have actually added to warming by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions, which form aerosols that reflect sunlight away from Earth, the organization said.
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