Global temperatures are on track to deliver the planet’s second hottest year on record in 2025—tied with 2023—after a historic high in 2024, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The new assessment places the world perilously close to the 1.5C threshold enshrined as a safer limit in the 2015 Paris Agreement and underscores how quickly the climate system is changing.
From January through November, average temperatures rose 1.48C above pre-industrial levels, Copernicus said in its latest monthly update, putting 2025 “currently tied with 2023 to be the second-warmest year on record.” That trajectory reinforces earlier warnings that the Paris guardrail is being breached more often and more broadly, even before long-term averages cross it.
- Advertisement -
“These milestones are not abstract — they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change and the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Ms Burgess of Copernicus said.
November provided another stark data point: It was the third warmest on record, at 1.54C above the pre-industrial baseline, with global average surface air temperatures reaching 14.02C. The northern hemisphere’s autumn—September through November—also ranked as the third hottest on record, after 2023 and 2024.
While these increments may appear small, scientists have long warned that every fraction of a degree compounds risk. The rising baseline is already destabilizing weather patterns and supercharging extremes. Copernicus reported that November was marked by a string of severe events, including tropical cyclones in Southeast Asia that triggered flooding and led to loss of life.
The Philippines endured back-to-back typhoons in November that killed some 260 people, the service said, while Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand grappled with massive floods. Such disasters reflect how a warmer atmosphere holds and releases more moisture, turning heavy rainfall into devastating deluges and making storms more destructive.
Temperature anomalies in November were uneven but striking. Readings were mostly above average worldwide—particularly in northern Canada, over the Arctic Ocean and across Antarctica—while northeastern Russia experienced notable cold anomalies. The patchwork underscores how a warming climate reshapes regional weather in complex, sometimes counterintuitive ways.
Copernicus draws on billions of satellite and in situ measurements—on land and at sea—with datasets extending back to 1940. The breadth of the observations allows scientists to track monthly, seasonal and annual trends with increasing precision, offering policymakers and the public a high-resolution snapshot of a planet in flux.
The fundamental driver remains the same: humanity’s emissions of heat-trapping gases, largely from burning coal, oil and gas at scale since the industrial revolution. Those gases blanket the Earth, trapping energy that would otherwise escape into space. The result is a persistent upward march in temperatures layered atop natural variability.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned in October that the world will not be able to contain warming below 1.5C in the next few years. That sober assessment aligns with Copernicus’ latest findings and with the cascade of extremes logged across continents—storms, floods and other disasters that strike more frequently and with greater intensity as the baseline warms.
Against that backdrop, the global debate over fossil fuels remains unsettled. Nations agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, a first-of-its-kind acknowledgment in the talks. Yet ambitions have stalled since then. The COP30 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, concluded last month with a deal that avoided a new, explicit call to phase out oil, gas and coal following objections from fossil fuel-producing countries.
The Copernicus outlook adds urgency to an effort that experts say must cut across sectors and regions: rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions while expanding clean energy, curbing methane leaks, and accelerating efficiency gains in buildings, transport and industry. At the same time, communities must adapt to a hotter, harsher reality by investing in flood defenses, heat action plans, early warning systems, climate-smart agriculture and resilient infrastructure.
None of those choices are simple; all of them are necessary. As 2025 approaches, the signal in the temperature record is unmistakable: warming is accelerating, extremes are amplifying, and the costs of delay are mounting. The world still has agency—to lower risks, to save lives, to protect economies—but the window for controlling the outcome is narrowing with each hotter month, each hotter season, each hotter year.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
