2025 is going to be either the second or third hottest year ever. With climate catastrophes striking India and other parts of the world, we take a look at a year when nothing was done to stop global warming
And so, another year of the Anthropocene is about to end. Goodbye 2025, you will not be missed. You will be remembered, if at all, as yet another year of let downs and betrayals by all the world leaders that promised to protect the planet from deadly climate change. You will be remembered as the year when the polycrisis of extreme inequality, erosion of democratic freedoms, a greed for other people's resources, genocidal wars, outright racism and degrading natural ecosystems visibly converged with the climate crisis. 2025 cannot end soon enough.
I started writing my Climate Change Tracker column in mid-2019. Over the past six and a half years, I must have written hundreds of these missives. They have, in a way, been a real time archive of the climate crisis getting steadily worse, even as scientists published even more detailed and even more urgent studies and warnings.
Over the years, any optimism that governments were making progress on bringing down emissions always turned into frustration about the slow, almost inactive global process. Meanwhile the scale of climate disasters striking India and the world keeps getting bigger and more frequent. In fact, it has reached a point where the thousands of people killed every year by climate disasters has become just another statistic.
It is hard to be a climate journalist and not live with a constant feeling of dread, of wrongness. And the reason for that is listening to governments justify year after year why they continue to sit on their hands and not start the phasing out of fossil fuels on a war footing. Encountering these excuses also breeds a sense of ennui, and anger in good measure, because the bunch of old men who lead the world are clearly just passing the buck to younger people. Not that the youth will be left with any resources to deal with it. For world leaders, it's somebody else's problem.
As things stand, there is a 1 in 20 (or 5%) chance of the world heating up by about 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. By comparison, the chances of a fatal airplane crash is 1 in 11 million. Quite simply, if a nightmare scenario has a 5% chance of happening, then we should work very hard to bend that probability down to zero. And 3 degrees of heating is indeed a nightmare scenario, and bare statistics can hardly do justice to such an outcome. But here are some anyway, from the United Nations.
A 3 degree rise by the end of this century would expose 3.25 billion people to deadly wet bulb temperatures -- a cocktail of heat and humidity that the human body can't withstand. It would utterly change the monsoon, making it completely unpredictable, and 43% of all Himalayan glaciers would be gone. Marine ecosystems would collapse, and extremely hot sea surface temperatures would fuel super cyclones that we can't even imagine today.
The thing is, we're halfway there. While world's governments agreed in 2015 to keep heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius or below by 2100, currently, the world has already heated up by over 1.4 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times. According to data released last week by the EU's Earth observation programme Copernicus, the three year global average heating for 2023-2025 set to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius. In November, a month that was marked with devastating floods across South and Southeast Asia, global temperatures were 1.54 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. 2025 is almost surely going to be the second or third hottest year on record. 2024 was the hottest, and 2023 the second hottest.
Since it is now clear that the world is going to smash through the 1.5 degree safety barrier much earlier than expected, a lot of the talk at the COP30 international climate summit last month was of managing 'overshoot'. What this means is that governments are now pledging to do what they can to ensure that heating subsides to below 1.5 by the end of the century. But frankly, this can only be done if we are serious about jettisoning fossil fuels like oil and coal in the next few years. If we can't then we will have to pin our hopes on developing unproven carbon capture technologies.
India stands to suffer more than most countries. South Asia as a whole is vulnerable to multiple climate impacts, from superstorms to droughts, heatwaves, floods, abnormal rainfall, melting glaciers and sea level rise. We see the entire cycle of devastation repeated every year. And the wild thing is that this is despite the fact that India has heated up less than the global average -- only 0.89 degrees Celsius over the past century. A new study by Indian climate scientists, titled A Post-AR6 Update on Observed And Projected Climate Change In India, maps the present and future of climate change on the basis of the latest science.
And the prognosis isn't good. Both the number of excessively warm days and nights are steadily rising in the country, and unless greenhouse gas emissions cease soon, by the last quarter of the century, India could heat up by a nightmarish 4.1 degrees Celsius above the baseline period of 1901-1930.
The only real glimmer of hope in 2025 came not from climate summits and bland government proclamations, but the cold data of the energy economy. Over the first six months of the year, electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind not just kept pace with the growth in global energy demand, but also outpaced it by a further 9% (above 2024 levels). As renewable energy becomes dirt cheap with each passing year, and energy storage and grid capacities improve, the sheer economic heft of a shift to renewables might be our only hope. And if that does happen, the polycrisis might also be solved. Because it belongs to the world of fossil fuels, the world that was in 2025.