In the race to be the hottest year on record, 2025 lost a hair.
It came in third place, at 1.47 C above the pre-industrial reference period (1850 to 1900), according to the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which runs and uses data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
That meant 2025 was 0.13 C cooler than the hottest year on record, 2024, and just 0.01 C cooler than 2023.
“It’s not good news,” said Florian Pappenberger, director general of the ECMWF. “It’s worrying, and it’s not just our issues.”
Other organizations have integrated data from Europe, including the nonprofit Berkeley Earth. Although the decimal degrees differ, they all come in at 2025 as the third warmest year on record.
But experts say third place still means a year full of dangerous and deadly conditions for hundreds of millions of people.
“We’re in the hottest decade right now,” said Fahad Saeed, a senior climate scientist with Climate Analytics, who was not involved in analyzing the temperature records. He added that just because 2025 didn’t take the top spot, it doesn’t mean state records weren’t broken.
From Dakar to Dushanbe
Last year was also the third hottest in Europe, according to European data. The sweltering summer heat added to that, scorching major cities like Barcelona, which recorded its hottest June in more than a century. The United Kingdom has recorded its warmest year ever, according to the UK Met Office.
All that warming was exacerbated by climate change, driven by people burning fossil fuels, and linked to more than 1,500 deaths in a quick analysis by scientists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Scorching temperatures broke more than 60 heat records across the country on Monday, but meteorologists say the weather could become the norm for summer by 2050.
In Canada, twelve heat waves – from southern British Columbia, to Fort Smith, NWT, to the Atlantic provinces – are also found to be caused by climate change, according to an analysis by Environment Canada.
And while all those regions are seeing extreme heat, in northwest Africa and several countries in central Asia, temperatures are approaching unimaginable levels.
“People were suffering, especially women and young people,” said Khady Camara, environmental activist and president of EcoFem in Senegal. Temperatures in the dry season, he says, rise to 40 C, children feel a heavy burden. His own 12-year-old son used to come home from school on those days tired.
“‘Oh, mom, I was hot, I’m dry. It’s very hot in our classroom, there’s no AC, there’s no fan,'” recalled Camara, who spoke to CBC News in French from Dakar. “And think, if this child in Dakar is tired, what about the child in the countryside who has to walk many kilometers under the sun, under 44-, 45-degree heat?”
Khady called it a sad and stressful event for the people of northern Senegal, especially women. He says they are the ones who bear the brunt of the field work outside, as many men leave rural areas to find opportunities in other areas.
Unexpected heat
In some countries, even the coldest times of the year are breaking records. Tajikistan went through unusual temperatures in March, and the expected relief at night during the hot summer months did not come.
“No one really slept that well in July and August,” explained Arnaud Caiserman, a senior researcher at the University of Central Asia, adding that hospitals in Dushanbe, where he is based, were full in July with people with respiratory problems.
As Toronto enjoys a third day of scorching heat, cardiologist Dr. Christopher Labos breaks down how extreme heat can affect the body.
But perhaps most impressive to Kaiserman, who studies mountains, was the spectacular fall of the Dehdal glacier, captured in an Instagram video last October.
“We say it’s drifting, which means you can see the snow moving from the top to the bottom of the valley very quickly, several meters per second,” Kaiserman said. “And this is due to the increase in the viscosity of the ice relative to and caused by the higher temperatures.”
Pacific heat ahead?
One of the reasons why 2025 does not take the top spot, experts say, is due to the influence of La Niña, which brings cooler conditions to the Pacific and tropical regions. Still, it was considered weak, as a Berkeley Earth report called it “the warmest La Niña year on record.”
Signals from the US-based Climate Prediction Center suggest that La Niña will transition to a “neutral” state soon – leaving the door open to potential warming later this year through its opposing force, El Niño. It’s not a certainty, but with El Niño contributing to 2023 and 2024 being the hottest year ever, it’s worrying.
Experts say greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced.
“Like many other places in the world, these [heat] episodes are more frequent and last longer,” Kaiserman told CBC News from near Lyon, France.
Saeed, at Climate Analytics, points to investment in renewable energy moving in the right direction – double the amount going to coal, oil and gas.
“So we are sure that renewables are the future and we can get rid of fossil fuels,” Saeed told CBC News from Islamabad.
“It makes economic sense, but the scale and speed at which it is needed is not feasible.”
