As the pace of climate change accelerates, extreme weather and other impacts are taking an increasing toll on populations and the environment around the world. Here are some of this year’s advances in climate science:
Warmer, faster
Global temperatures are not only rising, but they are now rising faster than before, with new records recorded for 2023 and 2024, and at some points in 2025. That finding was part of a key study in June that updated baseline data used in scientific reports made every few years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The new research shows that the average global temperature is rising at a rate of 0.27 degrees Celsius each decade, or almost 50 percent faster than in the 1990s and 2000s, when the rate of warming was about 0.2°C per decade.
Sea levels are also rising faster now: about 4.5 millimeters per year over the past decade, compared to 1.85 mm per year measured over the decades since 1900.
The world is now on track to cross the 1.5°C warming threshold around 2030, after which scientists warn we will likely trigger catastrophic and irreversible impacts. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the world has already warmed between 1.3 and 1.4°C since the pre-industrial era.
turning points
Warm-water corals are facing near-irreversible extinction due to successive marine heat waves, marking what would be the first climate tipping point, when an environmental system begins to shift to a different state.
In October, researchers also warned that the Amazon rainforest could begin to become extinct and transform into a different ecosystem, like the savannah, if rapid deforestation continues as global warming exceeds 1.5°C, which is earlier than previously estimated.
They said meltwater from the melting ice sheet over Greenland could help cause an earlier collapse in the ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, that keeps winters mild in Europe.
In Antarctica, where ice sheets are also threatened, scientists are concerned about the decline in sea ice surrounding the southernmost continent. Similar to what is happening in the Arctic, ice loss exposes dark water that can absorb more solar radiation, amplifying the overall warming trend. It also endangers the growth of phytoplankton that consumes much of the world’s CO2.
Earth on fire
Along with heat waves and drought, wildfires still threaten to become frequent and severe.
This year’s wildfire status report, led by a group of weather agencies and universities, counted about 3.7 million square kilometers burned between March 2024 and February 2025, an area roughly the size of India and Norway combined.
That was slightly less than the average annual burn over the past two decades. But the fires produced higher CO2 emissions than before, as more carbon-rich forests were burned.
Deadly heat
Researchers are working on ways to assess heat-related health risks and consequences, as UN health and meteorological agencies estimate that about half the world’s population is already struggling.
The agencies also estimate that worker productivity will fall by 2 to 3 percent for each degree above 20°C, while another study conducted in the Lancet The magazine in October estimated global losses of more than $1 trillion due to lost productivity over the past year alone.
There is no consistent international definition of heat-related death, but technological advances are helping scientists fill data gaps and compare conditions from place to place.
For example, in Europe, a team at Imperial College in the United Kingdom used mortality trends to estimate more than 24,400 deaths this summer related to heat exposure in about 30 percent of the European population.
They attributed up to 70 percent of those deaths to climate-induced heat, based on the same mortality trends applied to a model of Europe without global warming.
For last year’s record-breaking European summer, another team used computer models to examine mortality statistics alongside temperature data and health parameters, estimating more than 62,700 heat-related deaths in 32 countries, or about 70 percent of the continent’s population.
Science under attack
The climate-denying US administration of President Donald Trump hopes to cut funding for agencies that collect and monitor climate and weather data, worrying a scientific community that says US leadership will be difficult to replace.
Trump’s 2026 budget request, which has not yet been approved by Congress, proposes halving NASA’s annual Earth Sciences budget to about $1 billion and cutting NOAA spending by more than a quarter to $4.5 billion, while eliminating its climate research arm, among other cuts.
Elsewhere, however, public spending on science is increasing, with record budgets for scientific research in China, the United Kingdom, Japan and the European Union. Last month, the EU also opened its real-time weather data tracking to public access.
