As the final hours of 2025 tick away, there is a collective sigh of relief tinged with profound despair. This year, destined to be remembered for its catastrophic failures, will not be missed. It stands as a stark monument to the broken promises of global leaders who vowed to shield the planet from the ravages of climate change but chose inaction instead.
The Convergence of Crises in 2025
This year witnessed a dangerous and visible convergence. The climate emergency intertwined seamlessly with a polycrisis of extreme inequality, shrinking democratic spaces, resource greed, genocidal wars, blatant racism, and collapsing ecosystems. For over six and a half years, since mid-2019, this column has served as a real-time archive, documenting the steady worsening of the crisis. Each new, increasingly dire scientific warning has been met with a frustratingly slow and inactive global political response.
The human cost has become a numbing statistic. Climate disasters, growing in scale and frequency, claim thousands of lives annually in India and across the world. For a climate journalist, this reality breeds a constant state of dread, fueled by hearing the same excuses from governments year after year for not initiating a war-footing phase-out of fossil fuels. The sense of anger and ennui is palpable, as a generation of older leaders passes the existential buck to the youth, who are being stripped of the resources needed to face this future.
The Stark Numbers: From 1.5°C Breach to a 3°C Nightmare
The data leaves no room for ambiguity. The world is hurtling past its safety limits. According to the EU's Copernicus programme, the three-year global average temperature for 2023-2025 is set to exceed the critical 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels. November 2025, a month of devastating floods in South and Southeast Asia, saw temperatures at 1.54°C above that baseline. 2025 is firmly on track to be the second or third hottest year on record, following 2024's peak.
This breach has shifted the conversation at forums like COP30 to managing an "overshoot," with vague pledges to bring temperatures back down by 2100. However, this is impossible without an immediate and decisive jettisoning of coal, oil, and gas. Failing that, the world gambles on unproven carbon capture technologies.
The stakes of failure are almost unimaginable. There is currently a 5% chance of the planet heating by around 3°C by 2100. To contextualize, the odds of a fatal plane crash are 1 in 11 million. A 3°C world, as outlined by the UN, would expose 3.25 billion people to lethal wet-bulb temperatures, make the monsoon utterly erratic, wipe out 43% of Himalayan glaciers, collapse marine ecosystems, and fuel unimaginably powerful super cyclones.
India's Precarious Position and Flicker of Hope
India, and South Asia broadly, is on the frontline of multiple, overlapping impacts: superstorms, droughts, deadly heatwaves, floods, and rising seas. A new study by Indian scientists, A Post-AR6 Update on Observed And Projected Climate Change In India, paints a grim national picture. Despite warming less than the global average (0.89°C over the past century), the number of excessively warm days and nights is rising relentlessly.
The projection is chilling: if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed soon, India could heat up by a catastrophic 4.1°C by the century's last quarter compared to the 1901-1930 baseline.
Yet, 2025 offered one genuine glimmer of hope, not from summits but from the energy economy. In the first half of the year, electricity from renewables like solar and wind not only met rising global demand but exceeded it by an additional 9% above 2024 levels. As renewables become cheaper and storage technology improves, this economic momentum offers perhaps the only viable path away from disaster. Solving this energy crisis could begin to untangle the wider polycrisis—a crisis born of the fossil fuel world that 2025 so painfully represented.
