2025 confirmed as the third warmest year on record
And that is not good news. Story 162
Welcome to Bridged2050: ideas for living well in a climate-ready Barnes.
Bridged does not report every twist and turn of climate reporting. Forecasts, provisional estimates, daily headlines, regional nuanrce —there are simply too many.
Instead, this project puts one measure at the centre of how it understands climate change: the actual global average temperature.
Get that right—or wrong—and everything else follows.
Below that headline number sit layers of lived reality: regional patterns, borough-level impacts, and neighbourhood experience.
This is the annual New Year update to the global average temperature.
Global temperatures in 2025 down slightly on 2024
That is not an invitation to celebrate.
Despite the temperature rise last year dropping off to 1.47ºC above pre-industrial levels, the last three years were the world’s warnest ever recorded.
As the BBC reports,
Despite natural cooling from La Niña, 2025 was still much warmer than temperatures even a decade ago, as humanity’s carbon emissions continue to heat the planet.
The figures come from the European Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Met Office, two of the most authoritative sources available. They confirm what has been evident for some time: short-term variability no longer alters the long-term trend.
A run of records since 2023
Professor Rowan Sutton, director of the Met Office Hadley Centre, put it plainly
We understand very well that if we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the concentrations of those gases increase in the atmosphere, and the planet responds by warming.
The effect of this increasingly warm atmosphere can be seen on the chart below.
On current trajectories, scientists now warn that the world is on course to breach the 1.5°C threshold more than a decade earlier than previously expected. The line that once marked a distant risk is fast becoming a near-term reality.
The BBC provides useful explanations on the changing climate and its consequences:
Notes & thoughts
Bridged began with a question,
How do we live well in Barnes during this climate emergency?
Judging by these results, it will never be as easy to live well as it is today. As challenging as that is for an optimist like me, it strengthens my belief we need to build the future, not patch up the present.