Mounting fossil fuel pollution 'made 2025 third hottest on record'

Last year was the third hottest on record, scientists said yesterday, with mounting fossil fuel pollution behind “exceptional” temperatures.

- Ajit Niranjan

Wildfires in California last August. Each month of 2025 except February and December was warmer than the corresponding month in any year before 2023, scientists have found

(ERIC THAYER/GETTY)

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said 2025 had continued a three-year streak of “extraordinary global temperatures” during which surface air temperatures averaged 1.48C above pre-industrial levels.

Current rates of heating could breach the Paris agreement’s limit of 1.5C before the end of the decade, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate agency - 10 years sooner than scientists expected when world leaders signed the pledge in 2015.

“We are bound to pass it,” said Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus. “The choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences.”