WMO Reports Record Earth Energy Imbalance in 2025

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization announced on Monday that 2025 marked a new record for the Earth's energy imbalance, with global temperatures ranking as the second or third highest on record, underscoring a decade of unprecedented warming from 2015 to 2025. The agency's State of the Global Climate report, released in Geneva, confirmed that the average global temperature last year was about 1.43 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline, while 2024 remains the warmest year at 1.55 degrees Celsius above that level.

The report highlighted the planet's escalating energy imbalance for the first time as a core indicator, measuring the difference between incoming solar energy and outgoing heat. Under stable conditions, these flows balance out, but rising concentrations of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—have reached their highest levels in at least 800,000 years, disrupting this equilibrium. The imbalance has grown since observations began in 1960, accelerating sharply over the past two decades and peaking in 2025 due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

More than 91 percent of the excess heat has...