The European State of the Climate 2025, a weighty annual report by the EU, confirms once again that Europe is the fastest-warming continent in the world. 2025 was extremely warm almost everywhere, and about 95% of Europe had above-average temperatures. Even near the Arctic Circle, temperatures exceeded 30°C.
The average temperature on Earth is now 1.4 degrees warmer than at the end of the nineteenth century, when humans began emitting greenhouse gases on a large scale. Europe has warmed by 2.5 degrees during that time, according to the new figures—much more than the global average.
Less snow and ice
That is due to “a combination of factors”: Europe is located quite far north on the globe, and the continent is a dry slab of land that is not cooled by water like the sea. Another reason Europe is warming particularly fast: we have less snow and ice, which reflect sunlight and thus slow warming.
You can also see from the number of days with frost how the cold is disappearing from Europe. The area with ‘frost days’ is shrinking. In the current climate, winter has retreated as far as Germany, and last year, for just two weeks of frost, you had to travel further afield, towards Poland.
The Arctic and subarctic regions are warming especially rapidly. Heatwaves now reach regions that used to stabilize Europe’s winter climate.
Low river levels
Another striking trend is the extremely low water levels in rivers. In a vast area, from the Netherlands to the Baltic states in the north and Turkey in the south, much less water flowed through the rivers than usual.
Due to the low river levels, there were, fortunately, few floods, although the situation was quite different in Spain and Portugal: there, a whole series of storms in November caused heavy rain and flooding.
‘Heat stress’
A new buzzword is ‘heat stress,’ a combination of temperature, humidity, wind speed, sunlight, and heat radiated by the environment. At a wind chill of 32 degrees, heat stress is ‘strong’; above 38 degrees, it is ‘very strong’, clarifies the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
In southern and eastern Spain, there were at least 50 more days than usual with severe heat stress last year. There were also dozens more tropical nights than usual in Spain and Portugal, with temperatures not dropping below 20 degrees. Even in cool Scandinavia, people became familiar with heat stress.
Almost everywhere in Europe, there were fewer days with ‘cold stress’, a wind chill of minus 13 degrees or colder. But the real tragedy is unfolding in Greenland.
Greenland
In 2025, Greenland lost a net 139 billion tons of ice, according to ECMWF calculations. An unimaginable amount equivalent to the ice of all Alpine glaciers, multiplied by one and a half, and all within a single year.
Sea level is already rising by about 3.6 millimeters per year, primarily due to the expansion of warmer water. By the year 2100, the sea is estimated to be about half a meter higher than it is now.
And in the meantime, one thing does not change: CO2 emissions. Approximately 2.6 parts of CO2 per million air particles in the atmosphere are added annually. “The pace of climate change calls for more urgent action,” concludes Samantha Burgess, Climate Head at the European weather center ECMWF.
