With 2025 officially complete, NASA has released its yearly Global Temperature Data that shows what many would have guessed: 2025 was one of the hottest years recorded since record-keeping began in 1880.
Specifically, 2025 has officially tied with 2023 as the 2nd hottest year on record, with 2024 still holding the top spot. According to NASA, 2025 actually edged out 2023 marginally, but was within the margin of error and effectively listed as a tie.
Global temperatures for 2025 were measured at 2.14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 1951-1980 baseline that the agency often uses because of the widespread global coverage and relatively recent time period relative to today.
The analysis comes from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which studies global change across a variety of metrics. The analysis was in line with findings from other agencies, both domestic and international, that study similar phenomena, like NOAA and Copernicus Climate Services in Europe.
The latest entry into yearly cataloged temperature is another reminder of the warming Earth and its implications, ranging from melting glaciers and sea level rise in coastal cities, habitat loss and species biodiversity threats, irregular patterns from plants and animals in blooming schedules to migration patterns and of course, more sustained heat waves and more.
Natural disasters are thought to be becoming more frequent and severe in accordance with rising global temperatures, too. NASA estimates that the U.S. sea level is likely to rise between one and 6.6 feet by the year 2100.
NASA explains some of the complexity in measuring the data worldwide and making corrections to account for variables in this educational page, allowing them to release a dataset each month.
In December 2025, the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) released its Metro Atlanta Climate Action Plan: A Comprehensive Climate Action Plan for the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area, which comprises 29 counties in Georgia defined by the 2020 census. The 124-page document details the ways in which the agency and its partners plan to address issues related to climate over the course of March 2026 to March 2027 — the implementation, outreach, and education phase.
The ARC previously released their Priority Climate Action Plan in March 2024 and their Climate Pollution Implementation Grants (CPRG).
A large part of the Metro Atlanta Climate Action Plan was developing a greenhouse gas inventory and comparing emissions from 2005 to 2022, with 2005 as a baseline. Greenhouse gases — in particular, carbon dioxide (CO2) — are largely attributed to the warming global temperatures, with the gases being trapped in the atmosphere and ultimately warming the planet through an amplified greenhouse gas effect.
According to the report, the Atlanta region at large has been taking action: between 2005 and 2022, total gross greenhouse gas emissions in the 29-county Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) decreased significantly in the 17-year window, from 89.61 MMT CO2e in 2005 to 74.95 MMT CO2e in 2022. The drop is attributed to “policy, economic, and demographic shifts” according to the MACAP.
Entities around the world — from local level with organizations like Climate Mayors to national and even international entities — have or are looking to develop their own climate action plans to both adapt to the warming world and curb any more greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to exacerbating the problem.
One of the most notable such agreements is the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 that sought to limit worldwide warming to 2 degrees celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or less, which President Trump pulled the U.S. out of in his first term, and is in the process of doing again in his second administration — a process started day one of his administration via an executive order.
Few countries, like the U.S. or China, have the ability to affect the warming climate; leadership on the issue from the most powerful, regardless of what other countries do or don’t do, is critical now more than ever. Some of the smallest islands least responsible for the climate change are some of the most susceptible to the effects, like the U.S.-owned Northern Mariana or Guam.
With different levels of urgency and acknowledgement of the climate issue from governments worldwide, along with varying levels of being able to reduce worldwide emissions, the question remains: Is it too little, too late? Or can we act together to tackle an issue where we will win or lose together as a planet?
