The 2025 global surface temperature verdict is in: it was one of the world’s three warmest years since 1850, the other two being its immediate predecessors. When the rapidly-warming ocean is factored in, our climate is in utterly new territory.
We know this despite the ructions in US government services under a climate-denying Trump administration. We have the data that prove it, because keeping weather records and analysing their content are the work of a global network that continues to function regardless of what any government thinks.
The World Meteorological Organisation’s assessment of 2025’s weather reinforces a growing scientific conviction that the world we knew before 1980 is long gone. In that year, the global average topped 0.5C of warming above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
The last of the “cool” years, when the world dipped below that mark, was 1992, the year of the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Ever since, the warming trend has been relentlessly upward. A 2026 graph from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows occasional sudden leaps in 1998, 2011, 2016 and 2023 – all strong El Niño years when a natural cycle boosts temperatures.
In 2024 the approach of a “cool” La Niña phase indicated a pause in warming, but climate scientists were shocked to see that this natural phase no longer works as it used to. That year breached 1.5C of warming for the first time, and 2025 was close behind even though it started and ended with a La Niña.
Why is this happening? The WMO finds two main reasons: first the build-up of greenhouse gases in the air, caused by continued emissions and plants’ increasing inability to take up excessive carbon dioxide, and second, very high ocean temperatures resulting in another reduction in CO2 take-up.
Other factors like low clouds and atmospheric circulation are part of the mix, says WMO, but that’s scientific caution at work.
There’s no getting away from the dominant driver of warming – 50 per cent more carbon dioxide in the air than when I was a kid – mostly because humans keep burning fossil fuels – petrol, diesel, natural gas, coal. Everything else hangs off that simple truth.
In our hearts we know this – all of us including Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and other political voices here and everywhere repeating the lie that none of the above matters; that we can put off decisive action and overshoot safe limits while continuing to enjoy our fossil-fuel bonanza.
Thanks to wavering support by the world’s governments for cutting emissions, in another decade or two no-one will be able to avoid the devastating consequences. Those culprits still alive and kicking might then be held accountable, but what would be the point?
After the 2024 global temperature shock, the following current information in Yale University’s authoritative climate bulletin e360 reflects widely-held positions among the world’s leading climate scientists. If you want to know what we’re up against, note this.
With nature no longer absorbing our abuse, says the Yale bulletin, Earth’s once-stable climate systems are now at various points of no return, where changes cannot be reversed. Future climate change won’t happen gradually but with sudden shifts, it says, citing leading Earth systems scientist Johan Rockstsrom.
The result will be a world permanently transformed, with devastating consequences for people and nature. Hopes currently being expressed that we can delay cutting emissions after overshooting temperature limits are fanciful. There is no way back to the world of our childhood.
A destabilised climate is expressing itself in weather catastrophes rising in frequency: soaring heatstroke deaths in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, raging winter wildfires in the US and escalating death and destruction from extreme wind and rain.
Last year, NASA scientist Bailing Li disclosed that her agency held data showing the intensity of the world’s weather rising dramatically over the past five years, while the International Chamber of Commerce reported a $2 trillion global bill from extreme weather over the past decade.
Pointing to models indicating 2C of warming within 20 years, the Yale bulletin warns that “without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate”.
Australians are used to extremes of wet and dry, calm and storm, fire and fury. But what they now see at home and abroad – unstoppable fires in dry landscapes and high winds, deadly heat, extreme precipitation inundating towns and delivering flash floods, devastating landslips – is above and beyond.
People in places affected don’t shrug any more because they understand this and know things are getting worse. Ambitious action to lower emissions is the only sensible response. Opposing it is unforgivable.