Climate change, exacerbated by human behavior, made 2025 one of the three warmest years on record, scientists said.
It was also the first time that the three-year temperature average exceeded the threshold set by law 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting warming to no more than 2.7 Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times. Experts say it is possible to keep Earth below that limit saving lives and preventing catastrophic environmental destruction all over the world.
The analysis by researchers at World Weather Attribution, published in Europe on Tuesday, came after a year people all over the world were crushed by the dangerous extremes caused by a warming planet.
Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Nina, the occasional natural cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that affects weather worldwide. Researchers pointed to the continued burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – which sends planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very quickly, it will be very difficult to achieve that warming goal,” Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told The Associated Press. “The science is becoming clearer.”
Extremes in 2025
Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars in damage every year.
WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as the most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half an area’s population or declaring a state of emergency. They carefully analyzed 22 of them.
That included dangerous heat waveswhich the WWA said was the world’s deadliest extreme weather event in 2025. The researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were ten times more likely than a decade ago due to climate change.
“The heat waves we observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change,” Otto said. “It makes a huge difference.”
In the meantime, the prolonged drought has contributed to this forest fires that scorched Greece and Turkey. Torrential rain and flooding in Mexico dozens of people killed and many more missing. Super typhoon Fung-wong hit the Philippinescausing more than a million people to evacuate. Monsoon rains India was ravaged by floods and landslides.
The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people around the world to respond and adapt to these events with sufficient warning, time and resources, what the scientists called “limits of adaptation.” The report cited Hurricane Melissa as an example: the storm became more intense so quickly that made forecasting and planning more difficult, and Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti were ravaged so severe that small island states were unable to respond to and address the extreme losses and damage.
The global climate negotiations have come to nothing
The United Nations climate talks in Brazil in November this year ended without an explicit plan transition away from fossil fuelsand while more money has been pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, they will need more time to do so.
Civil servants, scientists and analysts have admitted that Global warming will exceed 2.7 Fahrenheit, although some say reversing that trend remains possible.
Yet different countries are seeing different levels of progress.
China does rapid deployment of renewable energy sources including solar and wind energy, but the country also continues to invest in coal. While increasingly common extreme weather across Europe has fueled calls for climate action, Some countries say this limits economic growth. Meanwhile, in the US the The Trump administration has dismissed the nation of clean energy policy in favor of measures supporting coal, oil and gas.
“The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year and many policymakers are very clearly making policies in the interest of the fossil fuel industry and not in the interest of the people of their country,” Otto said. “And we have a tremendous amount of misinformation and disinformation that people are dealing with.”
Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at Columbia University Climate School who was not involved in the WWA work, said places are experiencing disasters they are not used to, and extreme events are increasing at a faster rate and becoming more complex. That requires earlier warnings and new approaches to response and recovery, he said.
“Progress is being made on a global scale,” he added, “but we need to do more.”
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