2025 Confirmed Among World’s Three Hottest Years, Marking Prolonged Breach of 1.5°C Threshold

In a stark consolidation of global climate data, the World Meteorological Organization announced on Wednesday that 2025 ranked among the planet’s three warmest years ever recorded. The finding coincided with a critical analysis from European Union scientists, confirming that global average temperatures have now remained above the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold for the longest continuous period since records began.

The WMO, which synthesizes eight leading international climate datasets, reported that six of these—including those maintained by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (managed by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) and the UK’s Met Office—ranked 2025 as the third hottest year in a 176-year observational history. The remaining two datasets placed it as the second warmest. All eight unanimously agreed that the last three years—2023, 2024, and 2025—constitute the hottest triple-year period on record, with 2024 retaining the title of the single warmest year.

A Sustained Breach: The First Three-Year Period Above 1.5°C
The minor variations in annual rankings stem from differing methodologies across datasets, which incorporate satellite observations, ocean buoy readings, and measurements from land-based weather stations. More significantly, the ECMWF confirmed that 2025 concluded the first rolling three-year period where the global average temperature was consistently 1.5°C above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels.

This 1.5°C mark is the ambitious lower guardrail established by the Paris Agreement, beyond which scientists project dramatically increased risks of severe and irreversible impacts, from catastrophic ice sheet loss to ecosystem collapse.

“Crossing 1.5°C as a multi-year average is a profound signal,” said Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “While it is not an immediate cliff edge, it underscores that we are now in the neighborhood of this critical limit. Every fractional increase in warming intensifies extreme weather, accelerating the strain on our societies and natural world.” Burgess added that current projections indicate 2026 will likely rank among the top five warmest years.

The Inevitable Overshoot and a Narrowing Choice
Under the 2015 Paris accord, nations pledged to pursue efforts to limit long-term warming to 1.5°C, measured as a multi-decade average. However, persistently high greenhouse gas emissions have accelerated the timeline. The ECMWF now states the long-term average target could be breached before 2030—a decade sooner than many projections at the time of the Paris signing.

“We are bound to pass the 1.5°C limit on a sustained basis,” stated Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The central choice for humanity is no longer one of prevention alone, but of how best to manage the inevitable overshoot—minimizing its duration and magnitude—and how to adapt to its escalating consequences for all natural and human systems.”

Currently, the estimated long-term warming level is approximately 1.4°C. However, on a shorter annual basis, the world first surpassed 1.5°C in 2024, a trend that has now persisted.

Extreme Weather: The Living Reality of a Warming Planet
Exceeding the 1.5°C threshold, even temporarily, correlates with more frequent and intense extreme events. This was vividly demonstrated in 2025, as wildfires across Europe released record-breaking carbon emissions, and multiple attribution studies directly linked climate change to heightened disaster severity. These included the intensification of Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and the devastating monsoon floods in Pakistan, which claimed over 1,000 lives.

Science Under Pressure Amidst Political Backlash
This escalating physical reality unfolds against a backdrop of growing political challenges to climate science. In a move that has drawn international concern, U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a “hoax,” last week initiated a withdrawal from numerous United Nations bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the world’s foremost authority on climate science.

This action stands in direct opposition to the overwhelming consensus of the global scientific community, which holds that climate change is unequivocally real, primarily driven by human activities—particularly the combustion of fossil fuels—and is accelerating with grave implications for planetary stability.

The combined reports from the WMO and Copernicus serve as a definitive annual health check for the planet, underscoring that the climate crisis is not a future threat but a present-day reality, with its window for effective mitigation rapidly narrowing.

 

 

 

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