2024 fries records as the hottest — breaks global warming marker
Cain Burdeau
(CN) — The planet smashed heat records last year and ended up as the warmest year on record, top climate scientists in Europe and the United States confirmed Friday.
“2024 was the warmest year in global temperature records going back to 1850,” said the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union agency that monitors the climate with a fleet of specialized satellites.
A combination of steady global warming caused by the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and the effects of an El Niño weather cycle were the main drivers behind last year's record heat, scientists said.
The extreme heat and El Niño fueled a series of disasters last year, including a severe drought in the Mediterranean basin, deadly floods in Spain and elsewhere, monster hurricanes in the United States and deadly wildfires. This year also is being marked by climate disasters with catastrophic wildfires continuing to rage out of control on Friday in California, burning swaths of residential areas in Los Angeles.
Other weather and climate agencies, including NASA and NOAA in the United States, the U.K. Met Office and the World Meteorological Organization, issued similar assessments about 2024's record heat.
Last year also was the first year when the average global temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial age and the advent of mass fossil fuel burning.
That's significant because the 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing carbon missions has the goal of keeping the planet from exceeding the 1.5 C mark. Scientists say the planet faces serious consequences if the climate reaches a point where the global temperature is routinely above the 1.5 C threshold year after year.
The global average temperature last year was 15.1 C (59.18 F), making it 0.72 C (1.29 F) warmer than the planet's average temperature since 1991, Copernicus said. Compared to the pre-industrial average, it was 1.6 C (2.88 F) warmer than the planet was before the industrial age, the monitor said.
Record-breaking heat began in the first part of 2023 and the arrival of El Niño. Since July 2023, every month except July 2024 saw the monthly global average temperature exceed the 1.5 C mark.
Last year also saw the hottest daily global average temperature when it hit 17.16 C (62.88 F) on July 22. Average ocean temperatures last year also were the hottest ever recorded.
The U.K. Met Office, Britain's weather agency, said 2024 was the 11th year in a row when the global temperature equaled or exceeded 1 C above pre-industrial averages. Also, each of the past 10 years was one of the 10 warmest years on record, according to Copernicus.
“By itself 1.5 C does not represent a cliff edge in terms of climate impacts, but every fraction of a degree rise in global temperature increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, commits the world to greater rises in sea level and increases the risk of crossing potential planet-altering tipping points such as breakdown of the Amazon rainforest biome or ice sheet collapse in Greenland or the Antarctic,” Rowan Sutton, a top climate scientist with the U.K. Met Office, said in a statement.
Friday's announcements were not a surprise. In early November, Copernicus said it was “virtually certain” that 2024 was to become the hottest year ever measured globally based on a string of record-breaking months. Other climate agencies made similar predictions.
El Niños routinely emerge in the tropical Pacific Ocean and typically bring hotter and less predictable weather. The Met Office said the weather pattern added about 0.2 C (0.36 F) to the planet's temperature,
A milder La Niña is expected to emerge early this year and bring more stable and cooler weather, but the World Meteorological Organization said in December it expects this La Niña to be mild and short.
The Met Office said it still expects 2025 to be one of the three warmest years for global average temperature, falling in line just behind 2024 and 2023.
Samantha Burgess, a Copernicus top scientist, said last year's extreme weather brought with it “unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events” that caused “misery for millions of people.”
“Each year in the last decade is one of the ten warmest on record,” she said in a statement. “We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5 C level defined in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above this level.”
Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus, urged countries to speed up efforts to combat climate change.
“Humanity is in charge of its own destiny but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence,” he said in a statement. “The future is in our hands — swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.”
Ominously, the string of recent hot years provides more evidence that human-caused climate change may be heating the planet faster than many scientists and climate models previously forecast. Carbon emissions, meanwhile, are still on an upward trajectory and have not yet peaked.
“The climate is heating to levels we’ve spent years trying to avoid because countries are still burning huge amounts of oil, gas and coal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a statement. “The world doesn’t need to come up with a magical solution to stop things from getting worse in 2025. We know exactly what we need to do to transition away from fossil fuels, halt deforestation and make societies more resilient to the changes in the climate we see so clearly in this report.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.