WASHINGTON (AP) — Last year, the Earth’s average temperature reached alarmingly high levels, a continuation of the warming trend observed in recent decades. However, it didn’t surpass the record-breaking heat of 2024, as reported by several climate monitoring organizations on Tuesday.

According to five scientific teams, 2025 ranked as the third hottest year ever recorded, trailing only behind 2024 and 2023. These recent years have hovered perilously close to the globally recognized warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. This target, set during the 2015 Paris Agreement, is expected to be exceeded before the decade concludes, experts have warned.

Reports indicate that the temperature averages for 2025 fluctuated around — and often exceeded — 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The European climate agency, Copernicus, noted that last year’s average global temperature was 14.97 degrees Celsius (58.95 degrees Fahrenheit), marking an increase of 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.65 degrees Fahrenheit) since the pre-industrial era.

With global temperatures on the rise, there is an amplification of heat waves and other extreme weather events, posing severe risks to human life and resulting in billions of dollars in damages. Climate monitoring teams caution that the temperature increase seen in 2025 signals a troubling intensification of storms, heat, floods, and wildfires.

Earth is warming at a faster rate

The last 11 years have been the hottest on record, according to climate monitoring groups. When plotted on a graph, the years 2023, 2024, and 2025 distinctly spike above the general warming trend observed since the 1980s. Collectively, these years have surpassed the 1.5-degree threshold, as confirmed by Copernicus.

“The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming. They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at the Berkeley Earth monitoring group.

While Rohde said nearly all of the warming is from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases, the past three years’ temperatures had a boost from a combination of less soot pollution from ships that normally has a cooling effect, peak solar activity and perhaps a 2022 underwater volcano eruption.

Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead of the Copernicus service, said the overwhelming culprit is clear: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

The five teams that found 2025 to be near record-breaking also included groups from the United Kingdom, China and Japan. American climate monitoring teams and the World Meteorological Organization were set to release reports Wednesday. Copernicus and Japan use a combination of satellite data and computer simulations, while the rest of the groups use ground and sea observations. Scientists say their results are all quite similar.

Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, who was not part of any of the teams, called what’s happening “another warning shot” of a shifting climate “where record/near-record global temperatures are the norm, not the exception.”

Higher temperatures endanger people

Burgess noted numerous heat waves in 2025 that broke local or national temperature records, having significant affects on people’s bodies, as well as other extreme weather.

“When we look at a warmer world, we know that extreme events become more frequent and more intense,” Burgess said, mentioning 2025’s Los Angeles wildfires. “When we have severe storms or a flooding events, the rain is more intense.”

Berkeley Earth calculated that 770 million people — one out of every 12 people on the planet — experienced record annual heat, with 450 million of them in China. Other record hot spots included much of Australia, northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula and Antarctica, according to Copernicus. The continental United States had its fourth warmest year on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found.

One major natural factor in global temperatures is the El Nino/La Nina oscillation — a cyclic warming or cooling of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather across much of the planet. Usually a warm El Nino spikes temperatures and its cool La Nina flip side depresses temperatures. Last year there were two weak cool La Ninas that weren’t strong enough to lower global temperatures, Burgess said.

An even warmer future waits

Some forecasts have an El Nino developing this year, but it’s still murky, meteorologists said. Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus’ climate service, said that when the next El Nino materializes, which he expects within the next couple of years, it will likely drive another record annual temperature.

Several of the climate monitoring groups are predicting that 2026 will be about as hot as 2025.

Looking ahead, both Copernicus and Berkeley Earth calculated that 2029 is the likely date that the planet’s long-term average will breach the 1.5 degree threshold.

“In a decade’s time when we’re in the 2030s … the number of extreme events around the world will increase. The cost associated with the damages and impacts of those extreme events will be worse,” Burgess said. “And we will look back to the mild climate of the mid 2020s with nostalgia.”