2025 One of 3 Hottest Years o 12/30 06:18

   

   (AP) -- Climate change worsened by human behavior made 2025 one of the three 
hottest years on record, scientists said.

   It was also the first time that the three-year temperature average broke 
through the threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting warming to no 
more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times. 
Experts say that keeping the Earth below that limit could save lives and 
prevent catastrophic environmental destruction around the globe.

   The analysis from World Weather Attribution researchers, released Tuesday in 
Europe, came after a year when people around the world were slammed by the 
dangerous extremes brought on by a warming planet.

   Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Nina, the occasional 
natural cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that influences weather worldwide. 
Researchers cited the continued burning of fossil fuels -- oil, gas and coal -- 
that send planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

   "If we don't stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it 
will be very hard to keep that goal" of warming, Friederike Otto, co-founder of 
World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College London climate scientist, 
told The Associated Press. "The science is increasingly clear."

   Extremes in 2025

   Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars 
in damage annually.

   WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as most severe in 2025, 
meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more 
than half an area's population or having a state of emergency declared. Of 
those, they closely analyzed 22.

   That included dangerous heat waves, which the WWA said were the world's 
deadliest extreme weather events in 2025. The researchers said some of the heat 
waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been 
a decade ago due to climate change.

   "The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our 
climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without 
human-induced climate change," Otto said. "It makes a huge difference."

   Meanwhile, prolonged drought contributed to wildfires that scorched Greece 
and Turkey. Torrential rains and flooding in Mexico killed dozens of people and 
left many more missing. Super Typhoon Fung-wong slammed the Philippines, 
forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Monsoon rains battered India 
with floods and landslides.

   The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the 
ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those 
events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call 
"limits of adaptation." The report pointed to Hurricane Melissa as an example: 
The storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more 
difficult, and pummeled Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left the 
small island nations unable to respond to and handle its extreme losses and 
damage.

   Global climate negotiations sputter out

   This year's United Nations climate talks in Brazil in November ended without 
any explicit plan to transition away from fossil fuels, and though more money 
was pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, they will take more time 
to do it.

   Officials, scientists, and analysts have conceded that Earth's warming will 
overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), though some say reversing that 
trend remains possible.

   Yet different nations are seeing varying levels of progress.

   China is rapidly deploying renewable energies including solar and wind power 
-- but it is also continuing to invest in coal. Though increasingly frequent 
extreme weather has spurred calls for climate action across Europe, some 
nations say that limits economic growth. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Trump 
administration has steered the nation away from clean-energy policy in favor of 
measures that support coal, oil and gas.

   "The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year with a lot of 
policymakers very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel 
industry rather than for the populations of their countries," Otto said. "And 
we have a huge amount of mis- and disinformation that people have to deal with."

   Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia University Climate 
School who wasn't involved in the WWA work, said places are seeing disasters 
they aren't used to, extreme events are intensifying faster and they are 
becoming more complex. That requires earlier warnings and new approaches to 
response and recovery, he said.

   "On a global scale, progress is being made," he added, "but we must do more."

   **

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