The image reveals Earth’s increase in temperatures across the years, including 2025 – officially the planet’s third-warmest year on record
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A picture can paint a thousand words. Such a sentiment is apt for the University of Reading’s latest climate stripes graphic, which highlights continued and unprecedented global heating in one singular image.
The University of Reading’s graphic shows how Earth has warmed across the past 176 years, using annual global temperature data from Copernicus Climate Change Service, ECMWF, NASA, NOAA, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth, and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
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The new data means the global climate stripes now have an extra dark red stripe to represent the extreme temperature of 2025.
‘2025 was slightly cooler than 2023 and 2024, but this drop should not be seen as a sign that things are getting better,’ said University of Reading scientist Professor Ed Hawkins.
‘The last 11 years have been the warmest 11 years on record, and 2026 is almost certain to continue this sequence due to the relentless accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, primarily due to burning fossil fuels.’
The climate stripes show the change in annual average global temperatures since 1950. Red stripes indicate hotter years, while blue stripes show cooler years, against the average of the period 1961–2010.
Stripes for individual cities, countries and continents can be viewed at showyourstripes.info and will be updated to include the latest 2025 data in the coming months.
A warming planet
The planet is undeniably getting warmer. The last three years were Earth’s hottest on record, thanks to emissions caused by human activities. Such activities will likely lead to further temperature records – and worsening weather extremes – unless emissions are sharply reduced.
Two examples of weather events that scientists have partially linked to climate change include the Los Angeles blazes in January 2025, and Hurricane Melissa in October later that year.
‘If we go twenty years into the future and we look back at this period of the mid-2020s, we will see these years as relatively cool,’ said deputy director of Copernicus Dr Samantha Burgess.
Continued upticks in temperature bring Earth closer to breaching the Paris Agreement: the international target set to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
‘Looking at the most recent data, it looks like we’ll exceed that 1.5 degree level of long-term warming by the end of this decade,’ said Burgess.
