The Earth has now experienced 11 consecutive years of record warmth, European Union (EU) scientists confirmed, with 2025 ranked as the third hottest year.
The warmest year on record was 2024. With this current rate, the Paris Agreement’s limit of 1.5ºC for global warming could be breached by 2030—over a decade earlier than predicted.
“It is inevitable that we’ll pass the threshold,” said Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) director Dr Carlo Buontempo. “And it’s up to us to decide how we want to deal with the enhanced and increased higher risk that we’ll face as a consequence of this.”
He was speaking in an online press conference ahead of the release of the findings by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which operates C3S and Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service on behalf of the European Commission.
The global surface air temperature in 2025 was 1.47ºC higher than the pre-industrial level, following 1.6ºC in 2024. The year 2025 was only marginally cooler (0.01ºC) than 2023.
The heat is largely the result of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, caused by emissions and reduced uptake of carbon dioxide by natural sinks, ECMWF said.
Global sea-surface temperature was also third warmest after 2024 and 2023, it added, associated with an El Nino event and other variability factors, amplified by climate change.
The release of ECMWF’s findings coincided with the global temperature announcements from other organisations involved in climate monitoring, including NASA, the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
WMO’s consolidated analysis of eight datasets confirmed that 2025 had continued the streak of “extraordinary global temperatures”. Two of these datasets ranked 2025 as the second warmest year on record, while the other six ranked it as the third warmest.
