The past month has officially been the warmest January ever recorded, raising fresh concerns among scientists about the pace of climate change, according to a BBC report.
January 2025 was initially expected to be slightly cooler than the previous year due to a shift in the Pacific’s natural weather cycle away from El Niño. However, contrary to expectations, it surpassed the January 2024 record by nearly 0.1°C, as reported by the European Copernicus climate service.
The ongoing rise in global temperatures is primarily attributed to greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. Despite this, scientists acknowledge they are still unable to fully explain why January 2025 experienced such an intense spike in heat.
This continues a trend of unexpected temperature surges observed since mid-2023, with temperatures exceeding previous projections by approximately 0.2°C.
“The basic reason we’re having records being broken, and we’ve had this decades-long warming trend, is because we’re increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a statement to BBC News.
He further explained that while the overall warming trend is well understood, the specifics behind why 2023, 2024, and now the beginning of 2025 have been exceptionally warm remain unclear. “The specifics of exactly why 2023, and 2024, and [the start of] 2025, were so warm, there are other elements involved there. We’re trying to pin those down,” Schmidt added.
Data from the European Copernicus climate service illustrates this trend through a bar chart showing global average January temperatures from 1940 to 2025. The chart reveals a clear upward trajectory, with January 2025 registering the highest global average temperature of 1.75°C above pre-industrial levels, marginally surpassing the 2024 record. The visual representation also indicates that as the years have gotten hotter, the color of the bars has progressively darkened to deeper shades of red.
In absolute terms, January 2025 ended up 1.75°C warmer than the late 19th century, a period before human activities had a significant impact on the climate.
The warming trend early last year was partially influenced by the El Niño phenomenon, a natural climate pattern where abnormally warm ocean surface waters spread across the eastern tropical Pacific. This event releases excess heat into the atmosphere, further elevating global temperatures.
In contrast, La Niña conditions, which tend to have a cooling effect, are now developing, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Scientists expected this shift to lead to a slight drop in temperatures.
Currently, La Niña remains weak, and its full impact on global temperatures can take a few months to manifest. Even with this transition underway, experts anticipated that January 2025 would be cooler than January 2024.
“If you’d asked me a few months ago what January 2025 would look like relative to January 2024, my best shot would have been it would be cooler,” said Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal predictions at the UK Met Office.
He admitted that the reality has proven otherwise, and researchers are still struggling to understand the reasons behind this unexpected warmth. “We now know it isn’t, and we don’t really know why that is,” Scaife acknowledged.
