[I’m only able to quote a small part of this copyrighted article, read it here.]
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Yearlong: Extreme weather continues
As these global opportunities to make a difference on climate roll around, there is another certainty running through the calendar year: climate-driven extreme weather.
In 2024, billions of people around the world experienced heatwaves and extreme weather, including deadly floods in Spain, hurricanes in the US and severe drought in the Amazon. In fact, 2024 was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures breaching the critical 1.5C threshold for a full year for the first time.
As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, headlines in 2025 and beyond will continue to be dominated by large death tolls, suffering and destruction due to ever more extreme weather events – Friederike Otto
What’s harder to know is exactly when disasters will hit. But 2025 is also expected to be a scorcher: it will be one of the three hottest years on record globally, according to an outlook from the UK’s Met Office, falling just behind 2024 and 2023. Warm temperatures are forecast in 2025 despite the Pacific Ocean moving into a La Niña phase, in which sea surface temperatures are lower than usual and conditions overall are cooler.
“Years such as 2025, which aren’t dominated by the warming influence of El Niño, should be cooler,” Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the Met Office, stated in the outlook.
Still, the Met Office expects average global temperature in 2025 to be 1.29C to 1.53C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The world experienced an additional 41 days of dangerous heat due to climate change last year, according to a report by the World Weather Attribution group at Imperial College London, and the non-profit Climate Central.
Friederike Otto, who leads World Weather Attribution group, says the La Niña predictions mean 2025 “might be cooler than 2024” but argues “this is really irrelevant” if natural climate variability is masking the overall warming trend.
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