The 2024 it’s officially therehottest year on record and probably the hottest of the last 125,000 years: this is what emerges from the “Report on the State of the Climate” just published in the magazine BioScience and created by an international collaboration led by Oregon State University. The study, called The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brinktook as a reference 34 “vital parameters” of the Earth, from ocean temperatures to fossil fuel consumption, highlighting new record levels that are fueling global warming, with increasingly rapid climate change and potentially dangerous.
Some worrying data emerged from the Report, from the record energy coming from fossil fuels until ocean temperatures rise and loss of coverage forest.
The news comes less than two weeks before the start of the next one COP30, the 30th annual United Nations Conference on combating the climate crisis, which will start on 10 November 2025 in Belém, Brazil and which has among its main objectives the fight against global warming.
What the annual State of the Climate report says in summary
According to the annual State of the Climate report, 2024 was the warmest year on record, thus setting a new record for average global surface temperature. Specifically, from the study it turned out that:
- At the moment, 22 of the 34 “vital parameters” of Planet Earth have reached record levels: by vital parameters we mean factors such as ocean temperaturethe level of deforestation in the Amazon forest, CO emissions2 or the number of days experiencing extreme heat.
- In 2024 energy consumption from fossil fuels scored a new record, with coal, oil and gas at the highest levels. It must be said that even the combined consumption of solar and wind energy set a new record, but it still proved itself 31 times lower to the consumption of energy from fossil fuels.
- The ocean water temperatures reached a record high, contributing to the largest coral bleaching event on record, affecting 84% of the reef area.
- There loss global of forest cover due to fires reached an all-time high, with a 370% increase of fires in tropical forests compared to 2023. In Europe, among other things, these data are destined to worsen: according to Copernicus data, from 1 January to 28 October 2025, on our continent the fires they burned more than 1 million hectares, which is 650,000 hectares more than the European average for 2004-2024.
After the record of 2025, the situation, unfortunately, does not seem destined to improve this year:
- There glacial mass from the Greenland and that ofAntarctica have reached historic lows in terms of extension. The ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica are melting and this could cause sea levels to rise by several metres.
- In 2025 theCarbon dioxide present in the atmosphere is at record levelsprobably also due to a decline in carbon absorption by the soil, partly due to El Niño and partly due to intense forest fires.
- The global warming is starting to affect the quality and water availability, compromising agricultural productivity, sustainable management of water resources and increasing the risk of conflicts related to access to water.
The trend of global average temperature over millennia
As the study highlights, during theHolocene (i.e. the geological period that began approximately 11,000 years after the end of the last ice age), the Earth’s climate has remained fairly stable: This period of relative climatic calm allowed the development of agriculture, permanent settlements and the rise of human civilizations. It is true that global temperatures and hydrological conditions have undergone some slight fluctuations over the millennia, but this has created the environmental conditions that have allowed both ecosystems and societies to thrive.
The problem is that, now, this stability is giving way to a period of extremely rapid and potentially dangerous changes. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, human activities, and in particular the use of fossil fuels and changes in land use, have dramatically increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Over the past 50 years, global temperatures have risen at a faster rate than at any time in the past 2,000 years, and if nothing changes, it is possible that by 2100 the Earth reaches an increase of 3.1 °C compared to pre-industrial levels (UNEP 2024 data).
As highlighted by the study, every tenth of a degree more (i.e. 0.1 °C) causes a increase disproportionate gods disasters linked to extreme weather conditions, with more and more people facing thermal stress. It is no coincidence that last year saw a surge in climate disasters around the world, from large floods such as the one caused by DANA in Valencia or those in Emilia-Romagna, to hurricanes such as Milton, which went from category 1 to category 5 in just 7 hours also due to the high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
