The world will be hit by extreme weather in 2025, one of the hottest years on record

Climate change made worse by human behavior has made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists say.

It was also the first time the three-year average temperature exceeded the threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C since pre-industrial times. Experts say keeping Earth below this limit could save lives and prevent catastrophic environmental destruction worldwide.

THE analysis researchers from World Weather Attribution, released Tuesday in Europe, comes after a year in which people around the world have been slammed by dangerous extremes caused by global warming.

Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Niña phenomenon, the occasional natural cooling of the waters of the Pacific Ocean that influences weather patterns around the world. The researchers cited the continued burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – that send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that contribute to global warming.

“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very quickly, very soon, it will be very difficult to achieve this goal” of warming, Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution (WWA) and a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told the Associated Press.

“The science is getting clearer and clearer.”

Heat waves were the deadliest disasters of 2025

Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars in damages each year.

WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as the most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half of a region’s population or having declared a state of emergency. Of these, they closely analyzed 22.

This included dangerous heat waves, which WWA predicted would be the world’s deadliest extreme weather events in 2025. Researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change.

“The heat waves we saw this year are fairly common events in our current climate, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,” Otto said.

“It makes a huge difference.”

Meanwhile, a prolonged drought contributed to wildfires that ravaged Greece and Turkey. Torrential rains and flooding in Mexico have killed dozens of people and left many more missing. Super Typhoon Fung-wong hit the Philippines, forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Monsoon rains hit India, causing floods and landslides.

The WWA said increasingly frequent and severe extremes threaten the ability of millions of people around the world to respond and adapt to these events with sufficient warning, time and resources, what scientists call “the limits of adaptation.”

The report cites Hurricane Melissa as an example: the storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more difficult, and hit Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left small island nations unable to respond and manage its extreme losses and damage.

A bad year for global climate diplomacy

This year’s UN climate talks in Brazil in November ended without any explicit plan to move away from fossil fuels, and although more money was pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, it will take longer for them to do so.

Officials, scientists and analysts have admitted that Earth’s warming will exceed 1.5°C, although some say it remains possible to reverse this trend.

Yet progress varies by country.

China is rapidly deploying renewable energy, including solar and wind, but it also continues to invest in coal.

Although increasingly frequent extreme weather has prompted calls for climate action across Europe, some countries say it limits economic growth. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Trump administration has moved the nation away from clean energy policy in favor of measures to support coal, oil and gas.

“The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year, with many policymakers very clearly adopting policies in the interests of the fossil fuel industry rather than in the interests of their countries’ populations,” Otto said.

“And we’re faced with a huge amount of misinformation and disinformation that people have to deal with.”

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia University Climate School who was not involved in the WWA work, said places are experiencing disasters they are not accustomed to, while extreme events are escalating faster and becoming more complex.

This requires earlier warnings and new approaches to response and recovery, according to Kruczkiewicz.

“Globally, progress is being made,” he said. “But we need to do more.”