Earth records hottest ever year in 2024 and crosses key 1.5C threshold

According to scientists, the world has just experienced its first full year where global temperatures have been 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Union, which claimed the climate crisis is raising the temperature on the planet to levels that no modern human have ever experienced, confirmed the milestone on Friday.

“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 for that month since records began.

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

The C3S claimed that the 1.5C warming threshold was getting dangerously close, but this does not imply that it has been permanently broken.

“The primary reason for these record temperatures is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” from the burning of coal, oil and gas, said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at Copernicus.

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

More than a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit was recorded in the European database last year, surpassing the temperature of 2023 by an eighth of a degree Celsius. That’s an unusually large jump, until the last couple of super-hot years, global temperature records were exceeded only by hundredths of a degree, scientists said.

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

July 10 was the hottest day recorded by humans, with the globe averaging 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.89 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus found.

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

On Friday, scientists from the United States are scheduled to release their 2024 climate data.

A “rude awakening”

Nearly 200 nations came to a consensus in Paris in 2015 that limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels had the best chance of preventing climate change’s most disastrous repercussions.

However, the world is not at or nearing that goal.

Every continent now exhibits the effects of climate change, affecting people from the richest to the poorest nations on earth.

At least 10 people have been killed and hundreds of homes have been destroyed in California this week as a result of wildfires that are raging.

In 2024, Bolivia and Venezuela also suffered disastrous fires, while torrential floods hit Nepal, Sudan and Spain, and heatwaves in Mexico and Saudi Arabia killed thousands.

Because a hotter atmosphere can store more water, making for longer downpours, climate change is also worsening storms and torrential rain. In 2024, the planet’s atmosphere had a record-breaking amount of water vapour.

However, in some nations, the political will to invest in reducing emissions has declined as the costs of these disasters continue to rise.

US President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, has called climate change a “hoax”, despite the global scientific consensus that it is human-caused and will have severe consequences if not addressed.

The United Kingdom’s University of Bristol professor of global climate governance Chukwumerije Okereke claimed that the 1.5C milestone should serve as a “rude awakening to key political actors to get their act together.”

Source: Aljazeera