Last year, thousands of places, from Shanghai to Moscow to Salt Lake City, saw their hottest average annual temperatures since at least 1950.
As for cities with record-breaking cold, there was just one last year: Manvi, in the Indian state of Karnataka. It’s the first time any city in the world has seen its coldest year since 2014, according to new data from scientists at Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Record-low temperatures are becoming rarer and rarer as climate change brings hotter weather to virtually every corner of the globe.
As Harry Stevens and Eric Niiler put it: “Planet Earth isn’t cooling off anytime soon.”
They’ve built a tool you can use to look up temperatures in your city and see how each month of 2025 stacked up against its historic average.
Just shy of 1.5 degrees
Global temperatures in 2025 averaged 1.47 degrees Celsius, or 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, according to the data. Other estimates have put the number slightly lower, at 1.41 and 1.44 degrees Celsius.
Copernicus found that last year was the third-warmest year on record, after 2024 and 2023. The trend is clear: The last 11 years have been the 11 hottest since the organization began keeping records in 1950.
The 1.5-degree warming threshold looms large in climate science. As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly every country in the world agreed to try to avoid going past that level in an effort to head off the most severe effects of climate change.
That goal has been getting further out of reach. The Paris target is based on a long-term average. But in 2024, global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages for the first time. According to Copernicus, the three-year average now hovers above 1.5 degrees.
As Sachi Kitajima Mulkey wrote this week, climate change fueled a wide array of natural disasters last year, from the Los Angeles wildfires in January to the intense floods affecting the Pacific Northwest in December. Flooding events caused by melting glaciers leveled the town of Blatten, Switzerland, and cut a scar through the village of Thame in Nepal.
In the U.S. alone, disaster costs surpassed $100 billion, even though no hurricane struck U.S. shores.
The scale of climate-fueled disasters has added to a long-growing sense of urgency among vulnerable nations to scale up adaptation efforts. But according to a United Nations report in October, rich nations are sending less money to poorer countries to help out.
Predictions for 2026
That 2025 was cooler than the previous two years did not surprise scientists: La Niña conditions, which tend to lower global average temperatures, were present for much of the year.
For the same reason, researchers at Berkeley Earth Institute predicted this week that average temperatures in 2026 would most likely look similar and be slightly cooler than last year.
Stopping global warming would require a sweeping and global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But 2025 may herald another milestone in that category: Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have been on track to soar to record highs last year.
Journey to Antarctica
Your questions answered, Part Two
What does Antarctica sound like? And what do penguins sound like, for that matter? Raymond Zhong has answers.
Follow our journey to Antarctica here.
Insurance
How one company is pushing a private takeover of flood insurance
Flood risk is a losing bet for most insurance carriers because, when a big storm hits, damage can be extraordinarily costly and concentrated. That has left the federal government to insure most flood-prone properties for the past half century.
Project 2025, the conservative blueprint to shrink the federal government, calls for an end to the National Flood Insurance Program. One private company is working to persuade the Trump administration that private industry can step in.
The company, Neptune Flood, has proposed that the National Flood Insurance Program stop issuing new policies. It made pitches at meetings in the fall at the White House and the Treasury Department, according to Trevor Burgess, the company’s chief executive.
But experts are skeptical that a private company could replace the vast majority of the federal program’s offerings. — Scott Dance
China
Cleaner air in Beijing, but chilly homes in villages
Across Hebei Province, which encircles Beijing, villagers are confronting the full cost of the country’s push for cleaner air. The central government has banned burning coal for residential heating in much of the province since 2017, in an effort to reduce the choking air pollution that enveloped the capital every winter.
At first, local governments eased the transition by heavily subsidizing natural gas, which is cleaner but more expensive. But this winter, officials sharply cut or eliminated the subsidies.
Reports of villagers huddling under multiple blankets or secretly burning firewood for warmth (wood fires are banned, too) had circulated widely on Chinese social media.
Last week, Beijing announced it had recorded only one day of heavy pollution in 2025, a 98 percent drop compared with 2013. — Vivian Wang
More climate news from around the web:
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Wyoming approved what could be the largest single data center campus in the U.S., Inside Climate News reports.
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Cheap solar power is transforming life in Nigeria, according to Bloomberg. “After decades of having to retire at dusk or rely on noisy, smelly and expensive diesel generators,” its website reports, “local communities are able to take the energy supply into their own hands, thanks to the availability of cheap solar panels and battery storage.”
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In The Atlantic, the economist Noah Kaufman explains the questions about the trajectory of climate change that economists can’t answer.
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Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
The post The Cities That Broke Heat Records Last Year appeared first on New York Times.
