January 2025 was the warmest January ever recorded worldwide, announced the European observatory Copernicus on Thursday, surpassing the record set last year, despite the end of the El Niño phenomenon that accentuated global warming in 2023-2024.
„January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures recorded in the last two years, despite the development of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific and their temporary cooling effect on global temperatures,” the opposite of the El Niño phenomenon, said Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), as reported by AFP.
With an average temperature of 13.23°C, according to Copernicus, "January 2025 was 1.75°C above pre-industrial levels," before humans altered the climate through extensive use of coal, oil, and fossil fuels.
Thus, January 2025 is "the eighteenth of the last nineteen months in which the global average surface air temperature has exceeded pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5°C," notes the European observatory.
This exceeds the threshold of +1.5°C, which is the most ambitious limit in the 2015 Paris Agreement, aiming to keep global warming well below 2°C and continuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
However, the agreement refers to long-term trends: such an average rate of warming would need to be observed over at least 20 years for the limit to be considered exceeded.
Using this criterion, the climate is currently warming by about 1.3°C. The IPCC estimates that the 1.5°C threshold is likely to be reached between 2030 and 2035. And this regardless of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions trend, which are near their peak but not yet declining.
Global temperatures depend largely on sea surface temperatures, a key climate regulator covering over 70% of the globe.
However, in terms of ocean surface temperatures, January 2025 is the second warmest month after the all-time record in January 2024.
But Copernicus sees signs of a "slowdown or halt in the trend towards La Niña conditions," in other words, a reduced cooling effect on global temperatures in 2025.