The planet is on track to log its second warmest year on record in 2025, tied with 2023 after a historic high in 2024, Europe’s global warming monitor said on Tuesday.
The data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirms that global temperatures are on track to exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the threshold considered safer in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Temperatures rose by 1.48C on average between January and November, or “currently tied with 2023 for the second warmest year on record”, according to the service’s monthly update.
“The three-year average for 2023-2025 is on track to exceed 1.5C for the first time,” Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at Copernicus, said in a statement.
“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,” Burgess said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned in October that the world would not be able to contain global warming below 1.5C in the next few years.
Last month, according to Copernicus, was the third warmest November on record at 1.54C above pre-industrial levels, with the average surface air temperature reaching 14.02C.
Such incremental increases may seem small, but scientists warn that they are already destabilizing the climate and making storms, floods and other disasters more severe and frequent.
“The month was marked by a series of extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones in Southeast Asia that caused widespread, catastrophic flooding and loss of life,” the monitor said.
Fight for fossil fuel
The Philippines was ravaged by back-to-back typhoons that killed around 260 people in November, while Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand were hit by massive flooding.
The global average temperature for the Northern Hemisphere autumn, from September to November, was also the third warmest on record after 2023 and 2024.
“Temperatures were mostly above average worldwide and especially in northern Canada, over the Arctic Ocean and across Antarctica,” the monitor said, adding that there were notable cold anomalies in northeastern Russia.
Copernicus takes its measurements using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and their data stretches back to 1940.
Global temperatures have been driven ever higher by humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases, mainly from fossil fuels burned on a massive scale since the Industrial Revolution.
Nations agreed to move away from fossil fuels at the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, but ambitions have stalled since then.
The COP30 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, ended last month with an agreement that avoided a new, explicit call to phase out oil, gas and coal after objections from countries that produce fossil fuels.
