2025 could be the second or third hottest year in history - EU scientists

This year is likely to be the second or third hottest year on record, and could be surpassed only by the record-breaking hot 2024, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported on Tuesday, UNN writes with reference to Reuters.

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This information is the latest data from C3S following the COP30 climate summit last month, where governments failed to agree on significant new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting a tense geopolitical environment, as the US scales back its efforts and some countries seek to weaken CO2 measures.

"This year will also likely conclude the first three-year period in which the average global temperature has exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, when humanity began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale," the publication writes.

"These milestones are not abstract – they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change," said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at C3S.

This year, extreme weather events continued to batter regions around the world. Last month, Typhoon Kalmaegi claimed the lives of over 200 people in the Philippines. Spain suffered its worst wildfires in three decades due to weather conditions that scientists say have been exacerbated by climate change.

Last year was the hottest on record for the planet.

While natural weather patterns cause temperature fluctuations from year to year, scientists have observed a clear trend of rising global temperatures over time and confirmed that the primary cause of this warming is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

The World Meteorological Organization stated earlier this year that the last 10 years have been the warmest on record.

The global threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius is the warming limit that countries committed to prevent under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate to avoid the worst consequences of warming.

Technically, the world has not yet reached this target, which implies an average global temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius over decades. However, this year the UN stated that the 1.5-degree Celsius target is no longer realistic and urged governments to reduce CO2 emissions faster to avoid exceeding the target.

C3S records date back to 1940 and are cross-referenced with global temperature data starting from 1850.