BERLIN, January 14. /TASS/. Last year had a global average surface air temperature of 14.97 degrees Celsius (58.95 degrees Fahrenheit), ranking the third warmest year on record, a European climate change service said in a report.

"Copernicus data show that 2025 was the third warmest year on record, only marginally cooler than 2023, and 0.13 degrees Celsius (32.23 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than 2024 - the warmest year on record. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record," the climate change service said in a press release accompanying the publication of its annual report. In 2024, the global average temperatures stood at 15.1 degrees Celsius (59.18 degrees Fahrenheit) and the figure was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit) in 2023.

Over the past three years, global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial level, the Copernicus team reported. The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, aims at "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels," the team quoted the international treaty on climate change as saying. "The average global temperature for 2023-2025 exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius <…>. This is the first three year average to do so," the report reads.

Meteorologists say there are two reasons behind the warmth of 2023-2025, namely continued emissions of greenhouse gases amid reduced uptake of carbon dioxide by natural land and the strong El Nino event in 2023-2024, which typically causes an increase in average temperatures.

Copernicus experts believe that if climate warming continues, the globe could reach approximately +1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this decade, or 20 years earlier than previously estimated.