by This year will “almost certainly” be the hottest on record and the first to exceed a critical threshold to protect the planet from dangerous overheating, Europe’s climate monitor said on Monday.
The new benchmark, endorsed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, caps a year in which rich and poor countries were hit by disasters that scientists have linked to humanity’s role in the Earth’s rapid warming.
Copernicus said an unprecedented period of exceptional heat has caused average global temperatures to rise so much between January and November that this year is sure to eclipse 2023 as the hottest year yet.
“At this point, it is all but certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record,” the EU agency said in its monthly bulletin.
Copernicus scientist Julien Nicolas told AFP that global temperatures would reach “near record levels” at the start of 2025 and this could continue over the next few months.
Another grim milestone: 2024 will be the first calendar year in which it will be 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began burning large amounts of fossil fuels.
According to preliminary data, Copernicus said the year so far has been almost 1.6°C warmer than in the pre-industrial era, i.e. between 1850 and 1900.
Scientists say the risks of climate change increase with every fraction of a degree and that exceeding temperatures of 1.5°C over a period of decades would severely endanger ecosystems and human societies.
Under the Paris Climate Agreement, the world agreed to limit warming to the safer threshold of 1.5°C.
Copernicus Climate Change Service deputy director Samantha Burgess said a single year above 1.5C “does not mean the Paris Agreement has been breached, but it does mean ambitious climate action is more urgent than ever.”
– Catastrophic warming –
The world is still far from being on the right track. In October, the United Nations said the current direction of climate action would lead to catastrophic 3.1°C of warming.
Fossil fuel emissions continue to rise despite global pledges to transition the world away from coal, oil and gas.
When burned, fossil fuels release greenhouse gases that increase global temperatures, with additional heat being stored in the oceans and atmosphere.
Scientists say this warming effect is disrupting climate patterns and the water cycle, making extreme weather events more frequent and severe.
2024 saw deadly floods in Spain and Kenya, severe storms in the United States and the Philippines, and severe droughts and wildfires across South America.
In total, disasters caused $310 billion in economic damage in 2024, Zurich-based insurance giant Swiss Re said this month.
Developing countries are particularly at risk and will need $1.3 trillion in external aid annually by 2035 for their energy transition and to address climate change.
At UN climate talks in November, the major historic polluters most responsible for global warming pledged to raise at least $300 billion annually by 2035, an amount that was described as woefully inadequate.
– ‘Unusual’ –
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to support its climate calculations.
Its records date back to 1940, but other sources of climate data – such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons – allow scientists to expand their conclusions based on evidence from a much more distant past.
Scientists say the period we are in now is probably the warmest the Earth has experienced in the last 125,000 years.
Even by these standards, the exceptional heat since mid-2023 has sparked scientific debate.
The year 2024 began with the peak of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that is driving up global temperatures.
But scientists said El Niño, which ended around the middle of the year, could not alone explain the record-breaking heat in the atmosphere and oceans.
Nicolas said the end of El Nino had not proven to be a “major brake” on global temperatures and it was still unclear whether an opposite, cooling La Nina event would follow.
Robert Vautard, a scientist with the UN expert climate advisory body IPCC, told AFP that temperatures were starting to fall, but “very slowly, and the causes need to be analyzed.”
Last week, a study published in the journal Science suggested that a lack of low-lying clouds could result in less heat bouncing back into space.
A separate paper in May examined the possibility that cleaner-burned marine fuels release fewer mirror-like particles into clouds, reducing their reflectivity.
Nicolas said the recent heat was “clearly exceptional” but was still at the high end of the best available climate projections for global warming.
“As we get more data, hopefully we will understand better what happened,” he told AFP.
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