2025 continues streak of hottest years ever recorded

world(a) 2025 temperatures sear way of life higher up average

In the race to be the hottest year ever recorded by humans, 2025 lost by a hair. 

It came in third, at 1.47 C above the pre-industrial reference period (1850 to 1900), according to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which runs and uses data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service. 

That meant 2025 was 0.13 C cooler than the hottest year ever, 2024, and just 0.01 C lower than 2023. 

“It’s not good news,” said Florian Pappenberger, director general of the ECMWF. “It's quite concerning, and it's not just our news.”

Other organizations co-ordinated with the European data, including the non-profit Berkeley Earth. Though the decimals of degrees differ, they all arrived at 2025 as the third warmest year on record.

But experts say third place still meant a year replete with dangerous and deadly conditions for hundreds of millions of people. 

“We are in the hottest decade at the moment,” said Fahad Saeed, senior climate scientist with Climate Analytics, and who was not involved in the temperature record analyses. He adds that just because 2025 didn’t take the top spot, it doesn’t mean regional records weren’t broken. 

Last year was also the third warmest for Europe, according to the European data. Intense summer heat added to that, scorching major cities such as Barcelona, which recorded its hottest June in more than a century. The United Kingdom recorded its warmest year ever, according to the U.K. Met Office. 

All that heat was exacerbated by climate change, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, and linked to more than 1,500 deaths in a rapid analysis by scientists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

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In Canada, a dozen heatwaves — from southern British Columbia, to Fort Smith, N.W.T., to the Atlantic provinces — were also found to be made more likely by climate change, according to an analysis from Environment Canada.

And while all those regions saw extreme heat, for northwest Africa and several central Asian countries, temperatures approached unimaginable territory.

“People were suffering, especially women and young people,” said Khady Camara, an environmental activist and president of EcoFem in Senegal. The temperatures in the dry season, she says, approached upwards of 40 C, with children feeling the heavy burden. Her own 12-year-old son would come from school those days feeling exhausted.  

Khady called it a demoralizing and stressful event for people in Senegal’s north, particularly for women. She says they are the ones bearing the brunt of the field work outdoors, as many men abandon rural areas for opportunity elsewhere.

For some countries, even the typically cooler times of the year broke records. Tajikistan went through an unusual heatwave in March, and the expected nighttime relief during the hot summer months didn’t come. 

“No one really slept that well in July and August,” described Arnaud Caiserman, senior research fellow at the University of Central Asia, adding that the hospitals in Dushanbe, where he’s based, were saturated in July from people having breathing issues. 

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But perhaps most striking for Caiserman, who studies the mountainous regions, was a dramatic collapse in the Dehdal glacier, captured in an Instagram video last October.

“We say it surged, which means that you can see the glacier moving from top to valley bottom very rapidly, several metres per second,” Caiserman said. “And this is due to the increasing viscosity of the ice related and triggered by high temperatures.” 

One of the reasons 2025 didn’t take the top spot, experts say, is due to the influence of La Niña, bringing cooler conditions to the Pacific and tropical regions. Still, it was considered a weak one, with Berkeley Earth’s report calling it “by far the warmest La Niña year on record.” 

Signals from the U.S.-based Climate Prediction Center suggest La Niña will shift to a “neutral” status soon — leaving the door open to a potential warming later this year through its opposing force, El Niño. It’s not a certainty, but given El Niño contributed to 2023 and 2024’s hottest years ever, it’s worrying. 

Experts say greenhouse gas emissions must be brought down.

Saeed, at Climate Analytics, points to the investment in renewable energy going in the right direction — twice the amount going to coal, oil and gas.

“It is making economic sense, but the scale and the speed at which it is needed, that is not happening.”

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