2024 Is Officially the Hottest Year on Record

Earth exceeds 1.5 degrees C in hottest year on record

Who Andrea Thompson edited by Dean Visser

It’s official: 2024 is the hottest year on record exceeding the first 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures. It’s another milestone that underscores how much the current climate has changed from the past because fossil fuels are still being burned.

“All internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the warmest year since records began in 1850,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), said in a news release.

Last year, C3S measured 1.6 degrees C (2.9 degrees F) above pre-industrial temperatures, surpassing the record set in 2023. set the record by a wide margin In terms of global temperature, it was 0.17 degrees C (0.31 degrees F) above the previous record in 2016, according to C3S. The 10 hottest years on record occurred in the last decade, according to C3S data.

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Under the Paris climate accord, countries agreed to try to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees C and “well below” two degrees C (3.6 degrees F). This threshold has not yet been breached; the agreement takes into account the average of many years. But “we are now on the verge of exceeding the 1.5°C level specified in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above that level,” said Samantha Burgess, climate strategist at the Center for Central Europe. -Range Weather Forecasts, the parent organization of C3S, in the latest news.

Some of the superlative heat levels of the past two years were linked The appearance of an El Niño—Part of the climate phenomenon that is warmer than usual in the tropical Pacific Ocean. This warm water releases heat into the atmosphere, raising global temperatures slightly compared to a normal year and creating a ripple effect on global weather.

But most of today’s temperature rise since pre-industrial times has been caused by excess heat trapped by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Last October the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that the global average of carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) reached a record 420 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in 2023.₂ in pre-industrial times levels were around 280 ppm.

Such as reducing the rise in temperature and mitigating the disasters caused by climate change Recent fires in the Los Angeles area—will require a significant and rapid reduction in global emissions. “The future is in our hands,” Buontempo said in a press release. “Rapid and decisive action can yet change the course of our future climate.”

The use of renewable energy has grown rapidly in recent years, but rising energy demand has slowed efforts to reduce emissions. And the political winds in the US are not favorable to continue the progress made in the Biden-Harris administration: President-elect Donald Trump has sworn in to increase US fossil fuel production and weakening federal rules that limit emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Experts do not expect 2025 to surpass last year’s record, partly because the reverse of El Niño, La Niña, has begun. La Niña has cooler than normal Pacific Ocean waters and tends to cool global temperatures slightly. But this cooling effect is relative, and this La Niña is expected to be weak. The UK Met Office predicts that 2025 will be among the three warmest years on record, behind 2024 and 2023.

“2016 was an El Niño year and at the time it was the warmest year on record in terms of global temperatures,” said Adam Scaife of the Met Office in a news release issued by the agency last December. “However, compared to our projections for 2025, 2016 looks pretty good right now.”