This places 2025 as the third hottest year on record for land surface temperatures, according to data from the European Center for Medium-Term Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) within the Climate Change Service (“Copernicus”).
Over the past three years, the hottest years globally have been 2024, 2023 and 2025 – in that order, notes Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. The average global temperature during this period was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900).
At the current rate of warming, there is a risk that the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be exceeded by 2030 – that is, about 10 years earlier than previously predicted, the Anadolu material emphasizes.
Moreover, after 2025, it became obvious that the 11 warmest years in the history of observations were in the last 11 years.
In addition, the three-year period of 2023-2025 was the first time in history when the average temperature in three years exceeded the pre-industrial level by 1.5 degrees Celsius. In 2025, the year was the second hottest in history in terms of air temperature and the third warmest in terms of ocean surface temperature (20.73 degrees Celsius).
Antarctica experienced the warmest year on record and the Arctic experienced the second warmest year on record. Due to ongoing global warming, 2025 was marked by extreme weather events: extreme heat waves, powerful storms in Europe, Asia and North America, and large-scale forest fires in Spain, Canada and Southern California.
ECMWF Director General Florian Pappenberger, commenting on the results, noted that the world is experiencing the warmest decade in history and emphasized the importance of scientific data in the fight against climate change.
“The world is rapidly approaching the long-term temperature limit set by the Paris Agreement. Exceeding that threshold now looks inevitable. The only thing we can do now is to manage the consequences of this inevitable exceeding and its impact on societies and natural systems as effectively as possible,” Anadolu Agency quoted C3S Director Carlo Buontempo’s assessment of the situation as saying.
