2025 Will Likely Go Down As The Second Or Third Hottest Year In History
According to new data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2025 is set to become the world’s second or third hottest year on record, and will potentially be surpassing 2024’s record-breaking heat.
The date from C3S follows last month’s COP30 climate summit in which world governments couldn’t come to an agreement regarding taking substantial new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the US continues to rollback its efforts to combat climate change, other countries are also weakening their measures to cut CO2 emissions, Reuters reports.
In their monthly bulletin, C3S stated that 2025 will also likely top-off the first three-year period in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial period when humans began burning fossil fuels at the industrial scale.
“These milestones are not abstract – they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at C3S.
In addition, the Earth experienced a multitude of extreme weather events and disasters. Recently Typhoon Kalmaegi killed over 200 people in the Philippines and Spain suffered its worst wildfires in 30 years due to weather conditions that scientists stated were made more likely by climate change.
2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record.
Scientists have documented a clear heating trend in global temperatures over time, and they even confirmed that the main cause of global warming is greenhouse gas emissions from the continuous and increased burning of fossil fuels.
The World Meteorological Organization stated at the beginning of this year that the past decade has been the ten hottest years since weather records first began.
It’s been reported that the global threshold of 1.5 Celsius is the limit of warming which nations around the world vowed to try to prevent under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. This agreement was made in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
While the Earth has not breached that exact target, which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5 Celsius over decades, the UN stated that this year the goal can no longer realistically be met. The world’s governments have been urged to cut their CO2 emissions more efficiently and quickly.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.