Gulf residents have been told the climate will not only become hotter but also more humid, with a newly released report revealing that 2025 was the third-hottest year yet worldwide.
The Global Climate Highlights 2025 report said that the past three years have been the hottest on record – and that the world is close to breaching the maximum temperature threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
As this trend continues, evaporation from the seas in the Gulf region will continue to increase and will cause conditions outside to be increasingly uncomfortable, a researcher on the Middle Eastern climate has told The National.
Prof Jos Lelieveld, who researches climate change at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and The Cyprus Institute, said it was definitely the case that the Middle East would continue to feel temperature increases that exceeded the average for the world.
Earlier research has indicated that the region is warming at twice the global average rate and that wet-bulb temperatures, which reflect both humidity and temperature, are rising fast.
“Because of the warming of the seas, for example the Arabian Gulf, there’s more evaporation. It [climate change] not only increases the temperature, it increases the humidity,” said Prof Lelieveld, whose research focuses on the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
“It’s a lethal combination – high temperatures and high humidity. The comfort effect of heating and moisture is going to increase further.”
Hotting up
His comments came as Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, revealed that 2023 to 2025 was the first three-year period in history in which the average temperature was more than 1.5°C up on pre-industrial times.
When compared to pre-industrial times, before large-scale carbon emissions caused global temperatures to increase, 2025 was 1.47°C warmer, Copernicus revealed. This is 0.13°C cooler than 2024, which is the hottest year on record, and 0.01°C lower than 2023, the second-hottest year ever.
Information from organisations including Nasa, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the World Meteorological Organisation and the UK Met Office was used to compile the report.
Given how fast temperatures are increasing, Copernicus said in a statement that the 1.5°C threshold, which the 2015 Paris Agreement aimed to prevent the world from exceeding, could be breached on a sustained basis by the end of the decade.
Aside from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, Copernicus said that the past three years were exceptionally warm because of the El Nino weather system in the Pacific. This involves changes in water circulation patterns that increase temperatures.
Unmistakable trend
In a statement, Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said that the fact that the past 11 years were the warmest on record “provides further evidence of the unmistakable trend towards a hotter climate”.
“The world is rapidly approaching the long-term temperature limit set by the Paris Agreement,” he said. “We are bound to pass it; the choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems.”
Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science, said the fact that the average temperature in 2025 was marginally lower than in 2024 “doesn’t mean the Earth is cooling”.
Instead, it reflects the reality that 2024 “was an exceptional year”, he said, adding that the world was “in perilous territory”.
“The underlying trend is very clear: we’re very close to the 1.5 °C threshold,” Mr Ward told The National. “Beyond that the risks of worse effects include destabilisation of the polar ice caps of Greenland and West Antarctica.”
Impacts from climate change are already being seen, he said, citing increases in wildfires, droughts, heavy rainfall and flooding, and severe tropical storms.
He said global emissions were likely to peak “soon” because coal use in China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, was levelling off.
“Most countries can see renewables are the cheapest form [of energy generation], and it makes sense to move to electric vehicles instead of being dependent on petrol and diesel,” he said.
However, he cautioned that the longer it took for the world to reach net zero – when carbon emissions no longer exceed the amount of carbon removed from the environment and stored – the further temperatures would rise.
Amid a backlash in some nations against action on climate change, Mr Ward said that until net zero was reached, “People are suffering and will continue to suffer and temperatures will continue to rise.”
“The world must be driven by evidence and facts on climate change and not fall into the trap of copying [the US President Donald] Trump administration’s pretence that climate change doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter,” he said.
