Five-year forecast sees more killer heat, fires, temperature records

Top weather agencies forecast record-breaking heat, extreme weather, and rising global temperatures with deadly consequences in the next decade.

Get ready for several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery, and uncomfortable extremes, two of the world's top weather agencies forecast.

There's an 80% chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it's even more probable that the world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago, according to a five-year forecast released on Wednesday (May 28, 2025) by the World Meteorological Organisation and the U.K. Meteorological Office.

“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn't part of the calculations but said they made sense.

“So higher global mean temperatures translate to more lives lost”. With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change, “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires, and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” emailed Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He was not part of the research.

“And for the first time there’s a chance, albeit slight, that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s,” the two agencies said.

“There’s an 86% chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5 degrees and a 70% chance that the five years as a whole will average more than that global milestone,” they figured.

The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centres of scientists.