Will 2025 be the hottest year on record despite La Niña cooling effect?

La Niña cooling effect !

KAKALI DAS

January 2025 was likely the warmest January on record, with an average monthly temperature anomaly of 1.75°C above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) average, according to data from the ERA5 dataset analysed by climate scientists.

This unusual January warmth occurred despite the ongoing La Niña phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which typically causes cooler-than-normal temperatures worldwide. Notably, this was the first time January temperatures were significantly warmer than usual, even compared to surrounding El Niño or neutral years.

The year 2024,already,pushed our planet’s climate into uncharted territory, with temperatures soaring to unprecedented levels. This wasn’t merely a matter of breaking records—it brought about devastating consequences for both human and natural worlds.

As 2025 begins, scientists are already looking ahead, seeking to understand what the year may bring.

Let’s understand whether this year could rank among the hottest on record—or perhaps even set a new record.

For those with short attention spans, the answers are—almost certainly yes, and probably not, respectively.

For those with a bit more patience, let’s understand why the scientists say what they say even though the year has just begun. We’ll also explore why global temperatures matter in the first place. To understand their significance, we don’t need to look too far back in history.

Will 2025 be the hottest year on record despite La Niña cooling effect? — Image: pmel.noaa.gov

The planet experienced extreme heat in 2024, breaking the previous record set just a year earlier in 2023. To be clear, these were the two hottest years ever recorded since modern temperature tracking began over a century and a half ago.

By analysing the planet’s climate over distant periods, scientists have also determined that 2024 was likely the hottest year since before the last Ice Age. This means it’s been over 100,000 years since the world experienced temperatures this high.

In 2024, for the first time, global warming surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius over an entire year. This threshold was set as a critical limit to protect vulnerable communities and ecosystems. While a single year above this mark doesn’t mean we’ve permanently crossed it, it’s clear that we are dangerously close—and that’s deeply concerning.

For those wondering what this limit actually means—does it signify that global heating is out of control? All the evidence points to the fact that halting emissions can still stop further warming.

But why does the global average temperature actually matter? What does this number even signify? It matters a great deal, because these global figures have very real consequences for our human lives. We’ve seen this in the form of extreme weather events, such as the devastating downpour in eastern Spain last October that claimed hundreds of lives, or the heatwave in Mecca last June that led to over 1,000 fatalities.

Around the world, humans endured an average of six additional weeks of extreme heat, all due to climate change.

As World Weather Attribution explains, the countries that faced the highest number of dangerous heat days are predominantly small island nations and developing states, which are highly vulnerable and considered to be on the front lines of climate change.

Once again, we see how climate change disproportionately affects those who have contributed the least to the problem. Across the globe, rising temperatures, combined with droughts, are damaging agriculture and fuelling wildfires. To sum it up, 2024 was a tough year for the climate, and that means it was tough for all of us.

The obvious question is: Will 2025 be even worse? And that leads to another obvious question: How can we possibly begin to answer the first one? While climate scientists don’t have a magic crystal ball to predict the future, they do have physics.

Researchers can analyse the various factors driving today’s climate imbalance. This is how they were able to accurately predict that 2023 and 2024 could break records.

Here are the key signs that allow scientists to forecast the planet’s temperature at the start of the year.

The biggest factor driving our planet’s temperature imbalance is human emissions. This includes all the carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, and the air pollution we’re releasing into the atmosphere.

As time passes and we continue to release more of these emissions, the planet heats up. So, it might seem like the answer is obvious: with more emissions being pumped out, 2025 is bound to be hotter than 2024.

Humans aren’t the only factor influencing the climate; we also need to consider the El Niño Oscillation. This is a key fluctuation in Earth’s oceans, where certain years experience warmer-than-usual surface temperatures and others are cooler. The warm periods are called El Niño, while the cooler periods are known as La Niña, which translates to “little boy” and “little girl” in Spanish.

Climate scientists predict that 2025 will likely move toward the La Niña cooler phase, following two years dominated by the El Niño warmer phase. Taken together, this suggests that 2025’s temperature will probably not be a record breaker.

But, the UK’s Met Office is still predicting that 2025 will be one of the three hottest years on record, which is frankly staggering. The fact that this could still be one of the hottest years, despite our oceans shifting toward their cooler phase, highlights just how dramatically fossil fuels have already warmed the planet.

Once again, this will have profound impacts on our lives, whether it’s disrupting our ability to grow food and access water or leading to more frequent and severe extreme weather events.

Los Angeles was already facing the threat of three separate wildfires raging across the city, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate their homes. And with January being the hottest on record, it’s clear that 2025 will be an intense year for the climate—and an intense year for all of us.

However, it’s important to also acknowledge what we don’t know, as researchers make estimates about what could happen based on the evidence available today.

So, to be clear, no one can predict with certainty what will happen. There’s a range of estimates for 2025’s temperature, and of course, something unexpected could occur in 2025 that we can’t foresee yet. For instance, a massive, climate-altering volcanic eruption could take place.

While we’re on the topic of things unknown, it’s worth noting that while climate scientists correctly predicted that 2023 and 2024 would be potential record breakers, that doesn’t mean we got everything right. These years weren’t just hot as expected—they were even hotter than anticipated.

That’s something climate scientists are working hard to understand—whether it’s just a temporary blip due to changes in pollution or a shift in the way the climate is functioning. It could even be a combination of all these factors.

Understanding this is crucially important

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