2025 confirmed as one of three hottest years on record, close to breaching 1.5°C Paris limit
Thu 08 January 2026
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2025 has been confirmed at the world's third warmest year on record, almost tied with 2023 and 0.13°C cooler than 2024 - the hottest recorded. Average surface temperatures reached around 1.44°C above pre-industrial levels across eight independent datasets, suggesting that the 1.5°C Paris target for a 'safer' level of climate change is very close to being breached over a decade earlier than was predicted.
According to Copernicus' report, global temperatures from the past three years (2023-2025) have averaged more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level (1850–1900). This marks the first time a three-year period has exceeded the 1.5°C limit. Air temperatures over global land areas were the second warmest on record, whilst the Antarctic saw its warmest annual temperature on record and the Arctic its second warmest.
The data comes from leading organisations involved in global climate monitoring who have coordinated the release of their data – ECMWF, NASA, NOAA, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth, and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
Provisional results for the UK, in fact, showed that the country experienced the warmest year on record with UK temperatures in 2025 averaging 10.09°C, exceeding the previous record of 10.03C set in 2022.
Carbon Brief highlights particularly noteworthy findings from the global 2025 review including the fact that 2025 was the warmest year on record in areas where, collectively, more than 9% of the global population lives.
Last year was the warmest year on record for ocean heat content and one of the largest year-over-year increases in ocean heat content. In 2025, the oceans added 39 times more heat than all annual human energy use. Sea levels reached record highs, continuing a notable acceleration over the past three decades, partly because of record cumulative ice loss from the world's glaciers and from the Greenland ice sheet.
Carbon Brief says that the exceptionally high temperatures of the past three years have been driven by continued increases in human emissions of greenhouse gases (which reached new record concentrations in the atmosphere), reductions in planet-cooling sulphur dioxide aerosols, variability related to a strong El Niño event and a strong peak in the 11-year solar cycle.
Carbon Brief's expectations are that 2026 average surface temperatures are likely to be close to 2025, falling between the second and fourth warmest on record.
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