Briefs · Frontier Science
2025 Was the Third-Warmest Year on Record. The Consolation Prize Is That It Was Not the Warmest.
2025 was the third-warmest year on record. The consolation prize is that it was not the warmest.
Copernicus Climate Change Service, using its ERA5 dataset, puts 2025 at 1.47°C above the pre-industrial average of 1850–1900. It was only 0.01°C cooler than 2023 and 0.13°C cooler than 2024, the warmest year ever recorded. The global average temperature was 14.97°C, 0.59°C above the 1991–2020 average.
The past eleven years are now the eleven warmest on record. And 2023 to 2025 is the first three-year span to average above 1.5°C — the threshold the Paris Agreement treats as a limit, now passed in the rear-view mirror for three consecutive years.
Three warmest years, one broken threshold. The ranking shuffles by hundredths of a degree; the direction does not shuffle at all.
Conclusion: 1.5°C is not a future limit, but rather a rear-view mirror — three years have already averaged past it.
Read the original at Copernicus Climate Change Service
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