The Earth records its warmest year in 2024 and crosses the key limit of 1.5C | News about the climate crisis

The world has just experienced its first full year in which global temperatures exceeded 1.5C compared to pre-industrial times, scientists said.

The milestone was confirmed on Friday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which said the climate crisis is pushing the planet’s temperature to levels never before experienced by modern humans.

“The trajectory is just incredible,” C3S director Carlo Buontempo told the Reuters news agency, describing how every month in 2024 was the warmest or second warmest of that month since records began.

The planet’s average temperature in 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than 1850-1900, the “pre-industrial period” before humans began burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels on a large scale, C3S added.

That doesn’t mean the internationally agreed 1.5C warming threshold has been permanently breached, but C3S says it’s getting dangerously close.

“The primary reason for these record temperatures is the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” from burning coal, oil and gas, said Samantha Burgess, climate strategy manager at Copernicus.

“As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures continue to rise, including in the oceans, sea levels continue to rise, and glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt.”

Last year’s temperature eclipsed the 2023 temperature in the European database by an eighth of a degree Celsius (more than a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit). That’s an unusually large jump; until the last few super-hot years, global temperature records were exceeded by only hundredths of a degree, scientists said.

The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record and are likely the warmest in 125,000 years, Burgess said.

July 10 was the hottest day on record by humans, with an average temperature across the globe of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.89 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus found.

Britain’s Met Office on Friday confirmed a likely 1.5C temperature rise in 2024, while estimating a slightly lower average temperature rise of 1.53C for the year.

Scientists in the United States are expected to release their 2024 climate data on Friday.

‘Rude awakening’

In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed in Paris that limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels offers the best chance of preventing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.

But the world is nowhere near meeting that goal.

The effects of climate change are now visible on every continent, affecting people from the richest to the poorest countries in the world.

Forest fires are raging in California week they killed at least 10 people and destroyed hundreds of homes.

In 2024, Bolivia and Venezuela also suffered catastrophic fires, while flash floods hit Nepal, Sudan and Spain, and heat waves in Mexico and Saudi Arabia killed thousands.

Climate change is also making storms and heavy rainfall worse, as a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, leading to heavy downpours. The amount of water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere reached a record in 2024.

But even as the costs of these disasters rise, the political will to invest in reducing emissions has weakened in some countries.

The newly elected president of the USA Donald Trumpwho takes office on January 20, has called climate change a “hoax”, despite the global scientific consensus that it is caused by humans and will have serious consequences if not addressed.

Chukwumerije Okereke, a professor of global climate governance at the University of Bristol in the UK, said crossing the 1.5C limit should serve as a “rude wake-up call for key political actors to come to terms”.

“Despite all the warnings scientists have given, nations … are still failing to live up to their responsibilities,” he told Reuters.