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Planet Earth has just lived through its third-warmest year on record, EU scientists said on Wednesday.
Last year was also the hottest on record for Antarctica, another alarm bell that climate change is even catching up with the remote, ice-covered continent that for decades appeared sheltered from it.
Read more: Why Antarctica could hold key to our future
For the planet as a whole, 2025 came in as the third-hottest on record, according to new data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
The heat made extreme weather more dangerous, including the intensity of Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and monsoon rains in Pakistan that killed more than 1,000 people.
It also drove “nationally significant” water problems in the UK during its record hot summer.
How hot was 2025?
In 2025, average temperatures on Earth’s surface clocked in at 1.47C – higher than levels 150 years ago – following 1.6C in 2024, the warmest on record, and 2023 in second place.
The unprecedented heat of those past three years inched the world closer to a point it has been trying to avoid.
Under the landmark Paris Agreement, from 2015, governments agreed to try to limit global warming to ideally 1.5C above levels before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale.
That’s because climate impacts beyond that point become more dangerous, costly and disruptive – and some will be irreversible.
But temperatures across the past three-year period averaged 1.5C.
While such heat would have to last for five years before it is classed as a long-term trend, scientists now think that could happen as soon as 2030 – a decade earlier than had been predicted when the Paris treaty was signed.
Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at ECMWF, said: “1.5C is not a cliff edge. However, we know that every fraction of a degree matters, particularly for worsening extreme weather events.”
Why was 2025 so hot?
Two main causes have been blamed for…
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