2025 third hottest year on record as polar sea ice continues to melt

As last year is recorded as the third hottest on record, experts warn that the world isn’t paying enough attention to dangerous climate breakdown, as ITV News’ Science Correspondent Martin Stew reports

Record loss of polar sea ice as 2025 was the third hottest year on record.

Globally, 2025 was 1.47 C above pre-industrial levels — slightly cooler than the last two years, but still the third hottest year on record.

This means the last 11 years have been the warmest 11 on record. Symbolically, for the first time, three consecutive years have seen temperatures averaging more than 1.5 degrees of warming — the target we’re trying not to breach.

“To all intents and purposes, the 1.5C limit is now dead in the water.” according to Prof Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL. “Whichever way you look at it, dangerous climate breakdown has arrived, but with little sign that the world is prepared, or even paying serious attention.

With climate, we need to look at long-term trends. Each of these vertical stripes represents a year from 1850 up until last year. Blue is cooler than the average over that time. Reds are warmer.

You can see the warming trend is obvious. According to Professor Richard Allan from the University of Reading, natural fluctuations should have made last year significantly cooler than 2023 and 2024:

“The jump in global surface temperatures in 2023 are understood in the context of the continued human-caused heating of our planet combined with natural fluctuations that included an unusually lengthy La Niña cool phase flipping into a warm El Niño that peaked in 2024.

Yet the sustained warmth into 2025, without the natural warming influence of El Niño, underscores the urgency of halting the heating of planet Earth and growing climate impacts by rapidly cutting greenhouse gases across all sectors of society.”

Some places were hotter than others. The Arctic continues to warm four times faster than the global average. Even more worryingly, Antarctica, which had been more stable, had its hottest year on record.

I visited during their winter, when you would have expected sea ice to block our route — but it didn’t.

What we saw with our own eyes has been borne out by today’s data — confirmation that February 2025 saw the lowest combined level of polar sea ice recorded since we started monitoring with satellites back in the 1970s.

2026 is predicted to be around that +1.5C rise again. That number isn’t a cliff edge, but climate scientists warn that with every fraction of a degree it rises, so too do the chances of drought, heatwaves, and deadly storms.