2025 Won’t Be the Hottest on Record — But That’s No Comfort At All

Almost the hottest year now, possibly the coldest for the rest of your life

Almost the hottest year now, possibly the coldest for the rest of your life (created by author)

The air in an April morning in Patagonia has a weight to it — a slow, heavy cool that smells of rain in the forest and the first snowfalls in granite peaks. British Columbia in April smells of rain in the forest, too, but also of meltwater rushing off the mountains. I left one for the other this year, trading autumn’s first bite for spring’s thaw. In all, back-to-back summers for me. Two seasons of heat stacked so close that when colder days eventually show up, they feel foreign and colder than usual — like borrowing someone else’s weather.

Maybe this is why 2025 feels like the hottest year of my life?

But this isn’t a quirk of my travel schedule or because I’ve been chasing summer across hemispheres. It’s much simpler: winters aren’t what they used to be. The science confirms this feeling — freezing days are vanishing from our calendars. That one dramatic blizzard? It’s just enough theater to make us forget the winter that should have been. Just ask my friends at home in Patagonia: their ski lifts sit idle above brown slopes where white should be, because 2025 is amongst the worst seasons on record — all while our atmosphere keeps filling with an ever-rising concentration of heat-trapping gases.

Canada, prone to extreme Arctic air intrusion, should be the exception, right? Not anymore. 2024 was 3.1°C warmer (yes, more than twice the ominous 1.5°C limit) than its late-20th-century norm, tying its all-time high. The annual average temperature has increased at roughly twice the global average rate, and seven of the warmest years have happened in the last 20. The coldest? Half a century ago, in 1972. In the meantime, nearly a month of below-freezing days has simply vanished from the calendar, and those majestic glaciers that defined the Canadian landscape are disappearing before our eyes.

Well, though it certainly feels like it to me, 2025 won’t be the hottest on record. It will probably come second or third. And that’s supposed to feel like good news.

Source: Zack Labe

But it’s the kind of “good news” you get from a doctor when the cancer hasn’t grown — yet. The relief is fake. Because what you’re actually feeling is your brain adjusting: the dangerous, invisible creep of shifting baseline syndrome, when we recalibrate without even noticing.

Your grandparents remember winters that froze lakes solid; your parents remember shovelling waist-high snow; you remember ice on the sidewalk for a week or two; your kids will remember winters that barely happened at all. Each generation thinks their version of winter is the historical baseline, but that baseline has only been sliding. So every generation quietly accepts a more damaged world as normal — and year after year, the extremes we once feared become the averages we tolerate.

Memory is a fragile thing. It plays tricks on us. Recollections blur. But while our perceptions mutate, the climate follows its own rules — indifferent to whether we notice the changes or not.

And that’s why 2025 might indeed become one of the coldest years of the rest of your life.