January 2025 was the hottest January in recorded human history, with global temperatures entering record territory according to the Copernicus/ECMWF ERA5 dataset. According to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather’s newsletter The Climate Brink, January 2025 was warmer than every preceding January chronicled by scientists, surpassing the prior record set in January 2024 “by a sizable margin.”
“This means that January 2025 stands out as anomalous even by the standards of the last two years,” Hausfather explains. Writing for Discover Magazine, Tom Yulsman points out that scientists expected this January to be cooler than preceding Januaries because of the ocean current cycles like El Niño and La Niña. Yet those predictions did not come to pass.
