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The world exceeded 1.5C warming for the first time last year, leading international agencies said, as an “extraordinary” jump in the global average temperature sparked fears that climate change is accelerating faster than expected.
The European observing agency Copernicus confirmed on Friday that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with average surface temperatures 1.6C above pre-industrial levels after greenhouse gas emissions hit a new high.
It was the first calendar year in which average temperatures exceeded the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming from pre-industrial times to well below 2C, and preferably to 1.5C.
“Honestly, I’m running out of metaphors to explain the warming we’re seeing,” said Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo.
He added that last year’s spate of climate disasters — ranging from floods to heat waves — was not a statistical anomaly, but clearly linked to climate change fueled by rising carbon dioxide and methane.
Copernicus said the years 2015 to 2024 were the 10 warmest years on record.
The coordinated release of 2024 data from six climate monitoring organizations comes just days before President-elect Donald Trump is expected to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement to combat climate change.
Some companies around the world have also begun to weaken climate goals and scale back environmental efforts.
“Getting 1.5C is like watching the first domino fall in a devastating chain reaction,” said Patrick McGuire, a climate researcher at the University of Reading. “We are playing with fire. Every fraction of a degree unleashes more intense storms, longer droughts and deadlier heat waves.”
The latest data do not represent a definitive violation of the Paris Agreement, whose targets refer to temperature averages measured over more than two decades.
But concerns that climate change is accelerating have been heightened by evidence that the world’s oceans have cooled more slowly than expected following the natural El Niño warming effect on the Pacific Ocean.
What is “most striking is how much warmer 2024 and most of 2023 were,” added Tim Lenton, chair of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter.
“This is a clear signal of climate destabilization – a less stable system is undergoing larger and more persistent fluctuations.”
Human-induced climate change was the main driver of extreme air and sea surface temperatures in 2024, Copernicus said, while other factors such as El Niño, which officially ended last June, also contributed.
This year is expected to be cooler than 2024, partly due to the reduced influence of El Niño, which is cyclical. The beginning of a weak La Niña cooling cycle the American Meteorological Agency confirmed on Thursday.
But Samantha Burgess of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts said it was still likely to be among the three hottest on record.
“We now live in a very different climate to what our parents and grandparents experienced,” she said, adding that it’s probably been 125,000 years since temperatures were as high as they are today.
Copernicus said 2024 was the warmest year on record for all continental regions except Antarctica and Australasia, as well as “substantial parts” of the world’s oceans, particularly the North Atlantic, Indian and Western Pacific Oceans.
Global atmospheric water levels in 2024 will reach record levels, 5 percent above the 1991-2020 average, fueling “unprecedented heat waves and torrential rains, causing misery for millions of people,” Burgess said.
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