The planet is on track to record its second-warmest year on record in 2025, tied with 2023 after a record high in 2024, Europe’s global warming monitor said on Tuesday.
Data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service reaffirms that global temperatures are on track to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold considered safest in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Temperatures rose an average of 1.48°C between January and November, or “currently tied with 2023 as 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 1.5°C for the first time,” Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ climate strategy lead, said in a statement.
“These milestones are not abstract: they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change and the only way to mitigate future rises in 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 1.5°C in the coming years.
Last month was the third warmest November on record: 1.54°C above pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus, and the average surface air temperature reached 14.02°C.
These gradual increases may seem small, but scientists warn that they are already destabilizing the climate and making storms, floods and other disasters fiercer and more frequent.
“The month was marked by a series of extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones in Southeast Asia, which caused widespread catastrophic flooding and loss of life,” the monitor said.
Fight for fossil fuels
The Philippines was hit by back-to-back typhoons that killed about 260 people in November, while Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand suffered massive flooding.
The global average temperature during the northern hemisphere autumn, from September to November, was also the third highest on record after 2023 and 2024.
“Temperatures were mostly above average around the world and especially in northern Canada, over the Arctic Ocean and throughout Antarctica,” the monitor said, adding that there were notable cold anomalies in northeastern Russia.
Copernicus makes his measurements using billions of meteorological and satellite readings, both on land and at sea, and his data dates back to 1940.
Global temperatures have been increasingly fueled by humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases, largely from fossil fuels burned on a massive scale since the industrial revolution.
Nations agreed to abandon fossil fuels at the UN COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, but ambitions have since stalled.
The COP30 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, concluded last month with an agreement that avoided a new explicit call to phase out oil, gas and coal after objections from fossil fuel-producing countries.
