The World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate 2025 report, released in March 2026, confirms what recent years have been signaling: the planet's major climate indicators are still moving in the wrong direction, even in a year that wasn't quite the hottest on record. Global average temperature for 2025 came in around 1.43°C above the pre-industrial baseline, making it the second or third warmest year in a 176-year observational record — behind only 2024, and part of a run in which 2015 through 2025 are now, individually, the eleven warmest years ever recorded.
The greenhouse gases driving that warming kept climbing too. Atmospheric CO2 reached 423.9 parts per million in 2024, the most recent year with fully consolidated global data — up from roughly 278 ppm before industrialization, a 53% increase overall, and the single largest year-over-year jump since consistent global measurements began in 1957. Concentrations of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide are all now at their highest levels in at least 800,000 years, with CO2 specifically estimated to be higher than at any point in at least two million years based on ice-core and other proxy data.
The report's most notable addition this year isn't a temperature record at all: it's a new indicator called Earth's energy imbalance, which measures the gap between the energy the planet absorbs from the sun and the energy it radiates back out. That imbalance hit its highest observed level in 2025, and more than 90% of that trapped excess heat is being absorbed by the oceans — which is also why ocean heat content itself set another record this year. Scientists behind the report describe this energy imbalance as arguably the clearest single signal of how far out of equilibrium the climate system has become, since it captures the underlying accumulation of heat even in years when surface temperatures alone look relatively flat.
Sea level tells a similarly persistent story. Global mean sea level is now roughly 11 centimeters higher than it was in 1993, and 2024 set a new annual record for global mean sea level before preliminary 2025 data showed a slight, likely temporary dip tied to short-term internal climate variability rather than any reversal of the underlying trend. Ice loss continued to contribute directly to that rise: a global survey of reference glaciers recorded one of the largest annual losses of ice mass since tracking began in 1950, equivalent on its own to roughly 1.2 millimeters of global sea-level rise, while Arctic sea ice hit its lowest winter maximum extent on record. Taken together, the report's authors frame the picture plainly — with warming, greenhouse gas concentrations, and ocean heat all still climbing in tandem, holding global warming to the 1.5°C target agreed under the Paris Agreement is growing harder to achieve without at least a temporary overshoot.