The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Thursday that the 2025 is set to be either the second or third warmest one on record, with the alarming streak of exceptional temperatures continuing throughout the year so far, this will make the past 11 years, from 2015 to 2025, the warmest 11-year period in the 176-year observational record, with the past three years being the hottest on record.
According to WMO’s “State of the Global Climate Update”, the mean near-surface temperature from January to August 2025 was 1.42 degrees Celsius (±0.12) above the pre-industrial average.
The Paris Agreement, adopted by nearly 200 countries in 2015, aims to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Warming has already crossed 1.3 degrees Celsius and global emissions continue to rise. According to the WMO, 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first with a global average temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
However, a permanent breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius limit under the Paris Agreement refers to long-term warming over a 20- or 30-year period, not a single year. The Berlin-based climate science and policy institute Climate Analytics, in a report published on Thursday, said the world will very likely reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the early 2030s.
