There is no historical precedent for how badly out of balance the climate is now, U.N. warns
The past 11 years were the 11 hottest on record amid an increasing onslaught of climate-driven disasters, the World Meteorological Organization said in a new report
Earth’s climate is wildly out of balance, and there is no precedent in recorded history for what is happening now on our planet. That’s the conclusion of the World Meteorological Organization’s annual climate checkup.
“Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red,” The United Nations’ Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message accompanying the WMO’s report. The WMO is the United Nations’ weather and climate agency.
The period from 2015 to 2025 marks the 11 hottest years on record. And the ledger between incoming and outgoing heat is the most out-of-balance it has been in our observations, the agency warns. This is the first time that that indicator has appeared in the report. It reveals that the imbalance has been increasing since 1960 and particularly so in the past 20 years.
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“Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a press release.
Excess heat is being trapped by ever-rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere as humans continue to burn fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest in the past two million years, and methane is at its highest in the past 800,000 years, the report notes. Most of this heat—91 percent—is being absorbed by the world’s oceans. The ocean heat reached a record high in 2025, and that measure has risen twice as fast over the past 20 years as it did over the previous 40.
Just one percent of the excess heat is going into the atmosphere, including near Earth’s surface. But the rising temperatures and the growing imbalance are fueling an increasing barrage of deadly and costly weather disasters, including heat waves like the one currently obliterating records in the western U.S., floods like those that have inundated Hawaii in the past week and major droughts throughout the world.
“These findings are not confined to charts and graphs. They are written into the daily lives of people,” Guterres said in the same statement. Weather scientists have also warned that this year could see these extremes pushed even further by a potential El Niño, a climate pattern that is famous for producing heat records and driving ocean temperatures higher.
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