Ecological catastrophes hammer countries worldwide due to rising temperature

Global warming news highlights 2025 as potentially the second or third warmest year, with continued record-high greenhouse gases, lower Arctic sea ice, and rising ocean heat, even as nations make some climate commitments at COP30. Key stories include the passing of coral reef tipping points, new feedback loops accelerating Arctic warming, hidden heat under Greenland impacting sea levels, and research linking China's smog reduction to hotter Australian weather.

Floods, intense storms, rising temperature and heat waves continue to affect regions globally, from Afghanistan to the US. A dire warning comes from the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming, led by a group of international researchers and published in Earth System Science Data earlier this month. The report was signed by over 60 scientists across 17 countries.

Due to rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emission levels in the atmosphere, the world is on track to overshoot the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target within next three years. Planet-warming pollution rates exploded after the end of World War II. James Watt’s steam engine launched the Industrial Revolution in 1769. Before that, for thousands of years, humans were clearing forested land for farming, releasing carbon from trees and plants into the atmosphere.

The severity of global warming has long depended on your frame of reference — on what temperature you think was normal for the Earth before humans began changing it. That’s what makes a groundbreaking new temperature dataset released by a group of scientists based in the United Kingdom so striking. The datasets used to diagnose the modern history of the planet’s climate — and to proclaim that the world is now very near to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming — typically begin with the year 1850.

This extended time frame matters because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increased 2.5 percent between 1750 and 1850, enough to have caused some warming that the data hasn’t accounted for.

The new temperature record helps contribute to the growing sense among scientists that the Earth has warmed more than what calculations based on the 1850 starting year would suggest. “That 1850 start time is one that’s chosen for essentially practical considerations, given the information that’s available,” said Colin Morice, lead author of the new study and a scientist with the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK. “For sure, 1850 is not the start of industrialization.”

The new dataset, published in Earth System Science Data by 16 scientists, shows a significantly cooler Earth from the late 1700s through 1849 compared with 1850-1900 — the latter being what scientists have defined as the “preindustrial” baseline period used to assess the planet’s temperature change.