Earth Records Another Year Among Hottest on Record as Warming Acceleration Concerns Grow

Earth’s average temperature in 2025 ranked among the three hottest years on record, according to international climate monitoring teams, with scientists expressing growing concern that global warming could be accelerating.

Six scientific groups placed 2025 behind 2024 and 2023 in their rankings, while NASA and a joint American-British team calculated that 2025 was marginally warmer than 2023. Officials from the World Meteorological Organization, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) noted that the temperature difference between 2023 and 2025—just 0.02 degrees Celsius—is so small that the years are essentially tied.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, which averaged data from eight monitoring teams, the global average temperature in 2025 reached 15.08 degrees Celsius (59.14 Fahrenheit), putting it 1.44 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This marks another year that has flirted dangerously close to the internationally agreed-upon warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius established in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“The last three years seemed to jump up,” said Russ Vose, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief. When averaged together, these three years actually exceed the critical 1.5-degree threshold, according to data from the European climate service Copernicus.

Even more concerning to scientists, the pattern suggests warming may be accelerating. “The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming. They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that,” explained Robert Rohde, chief scientist at the Berkeley Earth monitoring group.

The climate data tells a stark story: the past 11 years have been the 11 hottest on record. While human-caused greenhouse gas emissions remain the primary driver of warming, scientists note that the unusually rapid temperature rise of the past three years received additional boosts from less ship pollution (which typically has a cooling effect), peak solar activity, and potentially the 2022 underwater volcano eruption near Tonga.

“Climate change is happening. It’s here. It’s impacting everyone all around the world and it’s our fault,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead of the Copernicus service.

The warming has real-world consequences. Berkeley Earth calculated that 770 million people—one in every 12 people globally—experienced record annual heat in 2025, with 450 million of those people living in China. Other regions experiencing record warmth included much of Australia, northern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Antarctica. The continental United States experienced its fourth warmest year on record, according to NOAA.

These temperature increases manifest in increasingly dangerous extreme weather events. “When we look at a warmer world, we know that extreme events become more frequent and more intense,” Burgess noted, referencing the Los Angeles wildfires that occurred in January 2025. “When we have severe storms or flooding events, the rain is more intense.”

What makes 2025’s high temperatures particularly noteworthy is that they occurred during a year with two weak, cool La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean, which typically have a dampening effect on global temperatures. “There’s a big part of the surface of the Earth that’s a little cooler than it otherwise would be and that’s probably gonna tuck temperature down just a little bit,” NOAA’s Vose explained.

Looking ahead, scientists expect more warming. Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus’ climate service, predicts that when the next El Niño materializes—likely within the next couple of years—it will probably drive another record annual temperature. Several climate monitoring groups forecast that 2026 will be approximately as hot as 2025.

More concerning, both Copernicus and Berkeley Earth have calculated that 2029 is the likely date when the planet’s long-term average temperature will permanently breach the 1.5-degree threshold.

“In a decade’s time when we’re in the 2030s… the number of extreme events around the world will increase. The cost associated with the damages and impacts of those extreme events will be worse,” Burgess warned. “And we will look back to the mild climate of the mid-2020s with nostalgia.”

Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, who was not involved with any of the monitoring teams, described the situation as “another warning shot” of a shifting climate “where record/near-record global temperatures are the norm, not the exception.”