Global temperatures over the past three years have, on average, exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed, underscoring a rapid escalation in warming and its risks. The service reported 2025 as the third warmest year on record and said the last 11 years have been the 11 warmest in modern records.
The new analysis, produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), places 2025’s average global surface air temperature at 1.47C above the 1850–1900 baseline. That follows an unprecedented 1.6C anomaly in 2024, the hottest year observed. ECMWF Director General Florian Pappenberger described the findings as deeply concerning, warning they heighten the likelihood of heavier precipitation and other extreme weather.
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Scientists stressed that the three-year overshoot of 1.5C does not, by itself, mean the Paris Climate Agreement has been breached. Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said the treaty’s 1.5C limit refers to long-term warming, which would require the threshold to be exceeded across many years—possibly two decades—to be considered crossed in a formal sense. But he cautioned that, at the current rate of warming, the agreement’s 1.5C target for long-term averages could be reached by the end of this decade, earlier than seemed likely when nearly all nations signed the accord 10 years ago.
“The choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems,” Buontempo said, framing the urgent policy and adaptation challenge that now confronts governments and communities worldwide.
Two drivers stand out in explaining the exceptional warmth of the past three years, according to Copernicus. The first is the relentless build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Emissions, largely from the continued use of fossil fuels, have risen, while natural carbon sinks—such as forests and parts of the ocean—have taken up a smaller share of the carbon dioxide emitted, diminishing the planet’s buffering capacity.
The second is the extraordinary rise in sea-surface temperatures across much of the global ocean. A strong El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern that warms parts of the tropical Pacific, layered additional heat on top of a long-term warming trend intensified by human-driven climate change. Copernicus scientists also noted contributions from changes in aerosol levels and low cloud cover, as well as shifts in atmospheric circulation that can redistribute heat and moisture.
Julien Nicolas, a senior climate scientist with Copernicus, said the world is “rapidly” approaching the Paris Agreement’s long-term limit and, in practical terms, is already experiencing the consequences of a 1.5C planet. “In a way, we are already living in a 1.5 degree world where we are seeing extreme climate events around the world every year,” he said in an interview with RTÉ’s Morning Ireland. Even if 2025 was not a global record, Nicolas added, extremes are occurring more frequently and with greater intensity as the climate warms.
He pointed to the drumbeat of severe weather and slower-moving shifts that are altering the planet’s systems: repeated heatwaves, heavier downpours, and droughts, alongside rising seas, accelerating glacial melt, and changes in ocean circulation. Those combined pressures, he said, will continue to build as long as temperatures rise.
For communities and ecosystems, the impacts are increasingly tangible. Samantha Burgess, ECMWF’s strategic climate lead, emphasized that it is not just the gradual warming trend that harms people and nature; it is the spikes. “Rather it is the extreme events that cause those catastrophic, devastating impacts for people and our environment,” she said, warning that such events are likely to intensify in the near term “until we cap our emissions and work towards net zero.”
Across Europe, 2025 delivered a punishing summer marked by multiple heatwaves and record wildfire emissions. A prolonged heatwave in June brought temperatures commonly associated with late July or early August, stretching from the United Kingdom to Greece. Nordic countries also endured significant temperature anomalies, highlighting the breadth of the continent’s exposure to heat stress and fire risk.
Globally, 2025 ranked as the second warmest year on record over land areas, Copernicus reported. The Antarctic registered its warmest annual temperature on record, while the Arctic—warming at more than twice the global average over recent decades in broader scientific literature—recorded its second warmest year. Half of the world’s land area experienced more days than average with at least strong heat stress, defined as a “feels-like” temperature of 32C or above. The World Health Organization recognizes heat stress as the leading cause of weather-related deaths, a reminder that extreme heat is not just a climate indicator but a pressing public-health threat.
The numbers arrive as policymakers grapple with how to keep the Paris targets credible. While the treaty’s core objective—to hold warming well below 2C and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C—remains intact, scientists say the path to stabilizing temperatures requires fast, sustained emissions cuts and deeper investments in resilience. The Copernicus findings suggest the window for making those changes count at the 1.5C level is narrowing.
If 2023–2025 marks the first multi-year period above 1.5C, the larger lesson from the data is that the world is entering an era defined by dangerous variability on top of a rising baseline. That means heavier rainfall where the atmosphere can hold more moisture, expanding drought where heat intensifies evaporation, and longer, harsher heatwaves capable of straining power grids, agriculture, and health systems.
For now, experts say governments and businesses should expect more turbulence. Seasonal shifts driven by El Niño and other ocean patterns will wax and wane, but the human-made layer of warming is pushing the system toward higher extremes. Each tenth of a degree matters, not just for polar ice and sea level but for everyday risks—from worker safety and crop yields to wildfire seasons and storm intensity.
The Copernicus assessment is ultimately a call to reduce the forces driving the trend while preparing for its immediate consequences. It affirms a stark reality: the climate system is moving quickly, and the line between the statistical threshold and lived experience has largely disappeared. With 2025 in the books as the third warmest year and the three-year average now above 1.5C, the question is no longer whether the world will feel the strain—it is how fast it can respond to contain it.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
