According to the European Copernicus Observatory, January of 2025 was the hottest January ever recorded on Earth. During the month, heat records set last year were broken, despite the end of the El Niño phenomenon that intensified global warming between 2023 and 2024.
Last month proved to be yet another extraordinary period, with record-breaking temperatures continuing to be observed over the past two years. This occurred despite the emergence of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which temporarily led to a dip in global temperatures.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Climate Change Service (C3S) at the Copernicus Observatory noted, however, that these conditions stand in stark contrast to the effects of the El Niño phenomenon.
As the average surface temperature reached 13.23°C, in January, it stood at “1.75°C higher” compared to the pre-industrial era, before humans began altering the climate through the mass use of coal, oil, and gas for energy production and other purposes.
January 2025 is therefore “the eighteenth of the last nineteen months in which the average air temperature at the Earth’s surface has exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” noted the European Climate Change Observatory.
In other words, it has surpassed the 1.5°C threshold, the target of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015, aiming to limit the temperature rise below 2°C.
The agreement, however, referred to long-term trends, meaning that this increase must be observed for at least twenty years for it to be considered that the threshold has been surpassed.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the UN, estimates that the 1.5°C threshold is likely to be surpassed between 2030 and 2035. This will occur regardless of the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions from humanity, which are close to peaking but have not yet begun to decline.
Global temperatures largely depend on those at the ocean surface, a key regulator of the global climate, as oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface. These temperatures remain at levels never before recorded since April 2023.
