The last three years have marked an unprecedented hot streak for the Earth. 2025 was its third-warmest year on record. The only two years that have been hotter globally were 2023 and 2024.
The three-year warming spike, the sharpest of its kind in climate records dating back to 1850, might signal an acceleration of climate change, according to scientists.
"Major economies that refuse to act are putting their own economic security in jeopardy," the chief executive officer at nonprofit Climate Group, Helen Clarkson, told Bloomberg. "Energy and food security, the ability to insure our homes, economic productivity — it's all at risk."
The annual global surface temperature in 2025 was 2.11 degrees Fahrenheit (1.17 Celsius) above the 20th-century average, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Europe's Copernicus Climate Change reported over the week starting Jan. 11 that the global surface air temperature was 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 Celsius) above the preindustrial level.
We are now in an era when each new year is expected to take its place on an ominous list of the warmest years for our world. The 10 warmest years on record have all happened since 2015.
"The planet is rapidly approaching the goal to limit long-term warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, above which the risks to lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems from pollution-fueled warming and extreme weather will intensify further," cautioned researchers with the nonprofit Climate Central.
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Organizations on the front lines helping those impacted by our overheating planet, like the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, are calling it a call to action.
"Droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events related to climate change and global warming are multiplying in frequency and ferocity, endangering communities, creating food insecurity, threatening water supplies, and forcing children to migrate — with their families or on their own," warned UNICEF.
The impacts from an overheating planet were noteworthy on a national level, too. The contiguous U.S. had its fourth-warmest year on record with an average temperature of 54.6 degrees in 2025, 2.6 above the 20th-century average, according to the NCEI's annual report for 2025.
Our warming world is fueling and, in many cases, supercharging a wide array of extreme weather events. The United States endured its third-highest number of billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in 2025. Record-breaking, deadly wildfires in Los Angeles, heat waves and drought in the West, and several severe thunderstorms in the central eastern U.S. contributed to 23 billion-dollar events that racked up $115 billion in damage, according to Climate Central.
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What is especially troubling scientists about the warming the world experienced in 2025 is that it occurred in a year that was dominated by a La Niña, the cooling phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The National Weather Service defines ENSO as "a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean."
The current La Niña conditions are expected to weaken and transition to a neutral ENSO phase between this month and March 20, the start of spring. The probability of the Pacific entering the warm phase of ENSO, an El Niño, rises by this summer and autumn.
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