BRUSSELS: The planet logged its third hottest year on record in 2025, extending a run of unprecedented heat, with no relief expected in 2026, US researchers and EU climate monitors said on Wednesday.

The last 11 years have now been the warmest ever recorded, with 2024 topping the podium and 2023 in second place, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation.

For the first time, global temperatures exceeded 1.5C relative to pre-industrial times on average over the last three years, Copernicus said in its annual report.

“The warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” Berkeley Earth said in a separate report.

The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement commits the world to limiting warming to well below 2C and pursuing efforts to hold it at 1.5C — a long-term target scientists say would help avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

UN chief Antonio Guterres warned in October that breaching 1.5C was “inevitable” but the world could limit this period of overshoot by cutting greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.

Copernicus said the 1.5C limit “could be reached by the end of this decade — over a decade earlier than predicted”.

But efforts to contain global warming were dealt another setback last week as President Donald Trump said he would pull the United States — the world’s second-biggest polluter after China — out of the bedrock UN climate treaty.

Temperatures were 1.47C above pre-industrial times in 2025 — just a fraction cooler than in 2023 — following 1.6C in 2024, according to the EU climate monitor.

Some 770 million people experienced record-warm annual conditions where they live, while no record-cold annual average was logged anywhere, according to Berkeley Earth.

The Antarctic experienced its warmest year on record, while it was the second hottest in the Arctic, Copernicus said.

An AFP analysis of Copernicus data last month found that Central Asia, the Sahel region, and northern Europe experienced their hottest year on record in 2025.

2026: Fourth-warmest?

Berkeley and Copernicus both warned that 2026 would not break the trend.

If the warming El Nino weather phenomenon appears this year, “this could make 2026 another record-breaking year”, Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, told AFP.

“Temperatures are going up. So we are bound to see new records. Whether it will be 2026, 2027, or 2028 doesn’t matter too much. The direction of travel is very, very clear,” Buontempo said.

Berkeley Earth said it expected this year to be similar to 2025, “with the most likely outcome being approximately the fourth-warmest year since 1850”.

Emissions fight

The reports come as efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the main driver of climate change — are stalling in developed countries.

Emissions rose in the United States last year, snapping a two-year streak of declines, as bitter winters and the AI boom fuelled demand for energy, the Rhodium Group think tank said Tuesday.

The pace of reductions of greenhouse gas emissions slowed in Germany and France.

“While greenhouse gas emissions remain the dominant driver of global warming, the magnitude of this recent spike suggests additional factors have amplified recent warming beyond what we would expect from greenhouse gases and natural variability alone,” said Berkeley Earth chief scientist Robert Rohde.

The organisation said international rules cutting sulfur in ship fuel since 2020 may have actually added to warming by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions, which form aerosols that reflect sunlight away from Earth.

US President Donald Trump urged Iranians on Tuesday to keep protesting and said help was on the way, without giving details, as Iran’s government tackled the biggest demonstrations in years.

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, adding he had canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the “senseless killing” of protesters stopped.

 The unrest, sparked by dire economic conditions, has posed the biggest internal challenge to Iran’s rulers for at least three years and has come at a time of intensifying international pressure after Israeli and US strikes last year.

Tehran has accused the US president of encouraging political destabilisation, inciting violence, and threatening the country’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national security, Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani wrote to the UN Security Council.

“The United States and the Israeli regime bear direct and undeniable legal responsibility for the resulting loss of innocent civilian lives, particularly among the youth,” he wrote in the letter, which was also sent to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

He wrote the letter in response to a social media post by Trump earlier on Tuesday.

An Iranian official, speaking to Reuters, said that people he called terrorists were behind the deaths of both protesters and security personnel.

The official, who declined to be named, did not give a breakdown of who had been killed.

On Monday evening, Trump announced 25% import tariffs on products from any country doing business with Iran — a major oil exporter.

Trump has also said more military action is among options he is weighing to punish Iran over the crackdown, saying earlier this month “we are locked and loaded”.

Tehran has not yet responded publicly to Trump’s announcement of the tariffs, but it was swiftly criticised by China. Iran, already under heavy US sanctions, exports much of its oil to China, with Turkey, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and India among its other top trading partners.

Russia condemns ‘subversive external interference’
Russia condemned what it described as “subversive external interference” in Iran’s internal politics, saying on Tuesday that US threats of new military strikes against the country were “categorically unacceptable.”

“Those who plan to use externally inspired unrest as a pretext for repeating the aggression against Iran committed in June 2025 must be aware of the disastrous consequences of such actions for the situation in the Middle East and global international security,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Despite the protests, which come at a particularly vulnerable moment for authorities, given the scale of economic problems, and years of external pressure, there are as yet no signs of fracture in the security elite that could bring an end to the system in power since the 1979 Revolution.

However, underscoring the international uncertainty over what comes next in Iran, which has been one of the dominant powers across the Middle East for decades, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he believed the government would fall.

“I assume that we are now witnessing the final days and weeks of this regime,” he said, adding that if it had to maintain power through violence, “it is effectively at its end”.

He did not expand on whether this forecast was based on intelligence or other assessments.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi dismissed Merz’s criticisms, accusing Berlin of double standards and saying he had “obliterated any shred of credibility”.

The United States on Tuesday designated the Egyptian, Lebanese and Jordanian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as global terrorists, citing in part what it called their support for Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

The move, which Washington formally set in motion last November, will bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.

The Treasury said it was labelling the three chapters as specially designated global terrorists. It has accused the trio of supporting or encouraging violent attacks against Israel and US partners.

“Chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood purport to be legitimate civic organisations while, behind the scenes, they explicitly and enthusiastically support terrorist groups like Hamas,” the Treasury Department said in a statement.

Egypt’s foreign ministry welcomed the move, describing it as a “crucial step that reflects the gravity of the group and its extremist ideology and what it represents as a direct threat of regional and international security and stability”.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Lebanese branch, also called Jama’a Islamiya, called the move a political and administrative decision by the United States that has no “legal impact within Lebanon”.

The Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s first free presidential election in 2012, but was overthrown by the military a year later after mass protests against its rule and has endured a fierce crackdown by authorities since then.