2025 Was World's Third Warmest; Past Three Years In Top 3 Hottest

 Scientists confirmed this week that 2025 was the world's third hottest year since at least 1850. 

World temperatures compared to the long term 
average since 1850.  As you can see, virtually the
whole world was warmer than that average in 2025.
The blob of white in the Pacific Ocean represents
La Nina, which is supposed to cool the world
a bit, but didn't last year. The white blob
south of Greenland represents melt water from
that ice cap, which keeps the North Atlantic cooler,

As NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI tells us, 2025 was 1.17 degrees Celsius, or 2.11 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average. Last year just barely missed tying 2023 as the second hottest year, missing it by 0.02 degrees Celsius or 0.04 degrees Fahrenheit.

At the start of 2025, climatologists said they expected the year to end up cooler than the previous two because a La Nina pattern had taken over for most of the year. La Ninas tend to cool the Earth slightly. 

That 2025 was a La Nina year and still ranked as third hottest is worrisome, since climate change clearly overwhelmed the expected cooling.

NCEI added that it's now becoming routine for years to end up warmer than the 20th century average by more than 1 degree Celsius:

"Notably, the 10 warmest years in the 176-year record have all occurred since 2015. Of the 10 warmest years on record, former record-holders 2015 and 2016 have dropped to eighth and fourth place, respectively. While 2016 was the first year to exceed the 1.0 degrees C threshold, that benchmark has since been surpassed in 2020 and again in the last three consecutive years (2023-25)."

Another benchmark the NCEI noted was oceanic heat content. In 2025 it was the highest on record, breaking the record set the year before. In fact, 2025 was the fifth year in a row in which oceanic heat content hit record highs.

This is important, since more than 90 percent of excess heat in the Earth's system is absorbed by the ocean. This extra heat content becomes fuel that would further bolster future global warming, and can create more intense storms than a cooler ocean would.  Hotter water also expands, which exacerbates sea level rise. 

NCEI also broke down the 2025 climate year in review into continents. 2025 was North America's fourth warmest year. Nine of the continent's ten warmest years have happened since 2006. The rate of warming in North America was 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade in much of the 20th century. Since 1981, that warming rate has more than doubled to 0.34 degrees Celsius per decade. 

Europe had its second warmest year on record. Asia was third warmest, South America was sixth warmest and Africa was seventh warmest.  The Arctic region had its second warmest year and Antarctica had it fourth warmest year in 2025.

Sources other than NCEI helped give a fuller picture of the extraordinary global warmth of 2025. Per Yale Climate Connections:

"According to Berkeley Earth, 9.1 percent of the Earth's surface had a record-warm year, including 10.6 percent of land areas and 8.3 percent of ocean areas. They estimated that 770 million people - 8.5 percent of Earth's population - experienced a locally warm annual average in 2025, The largest population centers affected by record warmth in 2025 were mostly in Asia, including about 450 million people in China."

Carbon Brief added these stats to the 2025 mix: 

Sea levels reached record highs in 2025, and sea level rise has accelerated noticeably in the past three decades. 

Cumulative ice loss from the world's glaciers and from the Greenland ice sheet reached a new record high in 2025, contributing to sea level rise. 

Concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide all reached record high levels in 2025.

Arctic sea ice saw its lowest winter peak on record and its 10th lowest summer minimum extent. Sea ice around Antarctica  reached its third lowest summer minimum extent. 

PREDICTIONS

The New Year has barely begun but experts are saying 2026 will bring us no relief from the recent climate changed-heat. 

Carbon Brief is saying 2026 will be the second, third or fourth warmest on record, very similar to the temperatures we saw in 2023 and 2025. 

Lingering La Nina might suppress temperatures a little in the opening months of the year, but an expected El Nino later in the year might bring 2026 to a hot finish, says the folks at Carbon Brief.

The Met Office in the UK is also saying 2026 will be among the top four warmest on record, and they're leaning toward this year being the second warmest year, coming in a bit cooler than the record holder 2024.

Berkeley Earth says the odds favor 2026 coming in at #4 on hottest year list, giving it a 51 percent chance of that happening. The odds that 2026 would come in 3rd place is 12 percent,; 2nd place 21 percent.  They give 2026 a 10 percent chance that this year will be the hottest on record. The chances that this year will be merely the fifth warmest or cooler are just 6 percent, according to Berkeley Earth. 

If you look at a chart of how each year's temperature compares to other years, you see that the world began warming rapidly at around 1980. 

But the past three years have been way, way hotter than anything seen before. Nations and regulators,  especially in Asia and in the world shipping industry have cut aerosol pollutants in recent years. These new environmental rules have allowed more sun to heat the Earth, since air pollution is blocking less of it. 

That could at least partly explain why the past three years have been so out whack with the heat. The question now is, will this much faster pace of warming that started in 2023 continue or will it level off a bit? Nobody knows for sure, but the question is important.

It's bad enough that the world has been warming so fast since the 1980s. If we've entered a new, faster pace of climate change, we're definitely not ready for it.  

Editor's Note: We'll soon do a followup post on how the United States did with climate in 2025, including an extraordinarily hot December in the western United States

World Had 3rd Warmest September Amid String Of Global Heat Waves

Graphic from Berkeley Earth showing most of the 
world was once again much warmer than normal
in September, the 3rd hottest on record. No
data from NOAA due to government shutdown. 

 Every month, I highlight a report from NOAA that takes a snapshot at the global climate for the previous month. 

During October, I didn't give the September report because it didn't exist. At least not from NOAA.

The federal government shutdown meant nobody at NOAA compiled the data or wrote a report.

After awhile, remembered that other groups also put monthly reports together. One of them is Berkeley Earth, an organization that provides open source environmental and climate data.

Berkeley Earth concluded that the world's September was the third warmest on record. Only 2023 and 2024 were hotter. It's worth noting that September, 2025 was much, much warmer than any other September prior to 2023. The three most recent years have been in a league of their own. 

The trend line for this entire year makes it appear 2025 will easily end up as the third warmest year on record, behind 20342 unless the end of the year is incredibly cold.  Preliminary data indicates October was probably globally much warmer than the long term average. 

In September, 2025, the highest temperature relative to their local averages were in almost all of North America, northeast Asia, the Arctic Ocean, North Pacific Ocean and around much of Antarctica. 

As always in our climate change world, it was hard to find any cool spots. But also as usual, a patch of the North Atlantic was relatively cool.

Berkeley Earth says their data is pretty accurate, but not quite as accurate as they'd like.  The problem is  some missing data from NOAA.

I'm not sure what happened with that NOAA data, but my guess is it all goes back to NOAA's brass and the Trump administration. Cutbacks. Blocking any information that risks highlighting climate change. Incompetence at the top, but not among the rank and file scientists just trying to do their jobs despite the interference of political hacks above them.

Since late August. some of NOAA's climate archives are broken or incomplete. Berkeley Earth draws from many data services, so NOAA's Trump-induced shortcomings. 

For some reason, "(In) NOAA's flagship climate monitoring program, the defects are strongly clustered with NOAA failing to report nearly all observations from China, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Spain and certain other areas. 

These weather stations continue to be operated by their local meteorological agencies, but their observations have not been capture day NOAA aggression services."

Berkeley Earth said they hoped that NOAA or somebody else will incorporate the data, reducing the uncertainty in that data.  

OTHER MEASUREMENTS

Other organizations measure Earth's temperature on a monthly basis and came to the same conclusion as Berkeley Earth. 

The European Copernicus Climate Change Service also concluded September was the third hottest on record. 

Copernicus also gives us data for Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. The ice data is particularly  important because the Arctic always reaches its minimum ice extent in September, and Antarctica reaches its maximum.

Arctic sea ice had its 13th lowest minimum in the past Antarctic ice had its 3rd lowest maximum on record .

Not the worst news ever in the land of ice, but certainly not great, either. 

It's Official: July Was Worlds Hottest Month On Record

An awful lot of red on the global July temperature departure
map.  It was by far the world's hottest July on record. 

 To the surprise of almost nobody who has been watching the world's weather and climate this summer, NOAA announced Monday that July, 2023 was the world's hottest month on record. 

According to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information: 

"The July global surface temperate was 1.12 degrees C (2.02 degrees F) above the 20th-century average of 15.8 degrees C (60.4F). This marked the first time a July temperature exceeded 1.0 C (1.8F) above the long term average."

Since July is normally the hottest month of the year for the globe as a whole (despite the fact it's winter in the Souther Hemisphere), last month will not only be the hottest July on record, but the hottest of any month. 

For those of you keeping track, July, 2023 was the 47th consecutive whose temperatures were above the 20th century average.  

MARGINS AND BLAME

The global record for hottest July was broken by a strikingly large margin. NOAA's data indicated that July, 2023 was 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the previous record hottest July in 2019.  That doesn't sound like much at all, but on a global basis, that's a huge margin. Until now, months that break the all time record for heat do so by exceeding the old mark by a few hundredths of a degree. 

Other organizations also measure the Earth's monthly temperatures, and they come up with slightly different results from each other. Remember, these reports are just very, very close estimates. There's going to be variations.

NASA measured the different in temperature this July compared to 2019 as 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. This would be the biggest margin by which a month exceeded the previous record high. Yeah, this is totally esoteric I get it, but it's really, really significant to climate watchers.

Almost everybody on Earth experienced a warmer than average July, but the toastiest spots, relative to average, were in northwestern and extreme northeastern Canada, parts of Alaska, Mexico, the southwestern United States, most of South America, northern Africa, southwestern Europe and roughly the area where Europe and Asia meet. 

Global temperature trend for Julys since 1950.
Click on the image to make it bigger
and easier to read. 

For the fourth consecutive month, global ocean temperatures were the warmest on record.  

Several factors combined to create our world's hottest July blame for the hot July to several factors, climate change being the biggie. 

Berkeley Earth assigned about two thirds of the July warmth to climate change. Another one-sixth of the blame went to the currently intensifying El Nino, which tends to boost the world's temperature. They assigned the remaining one sixth of the global heat to a combination of a 2022 eruption on Tonga that ejected water vapor into the atmosphere, new shipping emissions regulations that reduced the amount of sulfur pollution, and a solar cycle. 

In other words, without climate change, the world probably would have had a warmer than normal July, but not one that was over the top hot like this one. 

LOOKING AHEAD

I fully expect the global heat to continue when we see the August data in about a month.  I imagine August will either be the hottest on record or close to it. Climate change continues, and El Nino isn't going anywhere anytime soon. 

Already this month, we've seen some big heat waves around the world. The southern United States heat wave continues to grind on. Houston just experienced its hottest seven-day period on record.

A new heat wave is blasting the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Portland, Oregon reached 108 degrees Monday, the hottest August day on record there. 

It's winter in South America, but temperatures on some part of the continent exceeded 100 degrees anyway in the past week or two. Numerous cities in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and Cyprus just experienced their hottest-ever temperatures.  Japan also had a record heat wave over the weekend.