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The Northern Hemisphere is experiencing a red Christmas

2025 is ending with more smashed climate records, as large parts of the Northern Hemisphere recorded their highest December temperatures on record:

Record heat

As the Guardian reported, 25 December saw the US hit its warmest Christmas Day on record — what you might call a ‘red Christmas’.

Meteorologists have attributed the extreme weather to a ‘heat dome’ in which high pressure has trapped warm air near the surface.

Record temperatures from Christmas day included Oklahoma City, which hit 25°C (77°F). Additional records have fallen since then:

Temperatures have also hit record highs in Iceland:

While the Northern Hemisphere experiences Winter, the Southern experiences summer. And as people have highlighted, the upside down temperatures in the North aren’t always corresponding with a similar flip below the equator:

Australia, however, has experienced record-breaking low temperatures for December:

Climate change

‘Global warming’ is the phenomenon of average global temperatures increasing year on year. Berkley visualised this in the following graph:

Graph showing global temperatures rising

‘Climate change’ is what happens to climate systems as a result of rising temperatures and other factors. Essentially, climate change results in more chaotic climate and weather patterns, which is why we’re more likely to see both record heat and record cold. It’s also why extreme weather events are more common:

The following graph from Statista demonstrates that the frequency of floods, storms, and extreme temperatures have all spiked in the past few decades in Europe:

The following from Visual Capitalist shows something similar for the US:

While we can’t conclusively link individual weather events to climate change, we can state that the phenomenon is causing the increased frequency of them. While we’ve made significant progress on our ability to de-carbonise, however, the US has recently ‘gone into reverse’:

Featured image via Tropical Tidbits

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.