GabyCopernicus Climate Change Service said 2024 was the warmest year on record and the first calendar year where global temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.5 °C. Experts from Copernicus, a climate project of the European Union, said this unprecedented warming is primarily driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Warming will not stop until humanity achieves net-zero emissions.
A Year Like No Other
Andrew King, a lecturer in climatology at the University of Melbourne, and David Karoly, an honorary professor there, commented on Copernicus’s findings. Copernicus’s conclusions match other authoritative studies showing last year was the hottest since observations began in 1850. The average global temperature in 2024 was about 1.6 °C higher than the late-19th-century average. On July 22 last year, the daily global average temperature reached 17.16 °C, a new record reported by Science Alert. Copernicus also found that every year of the last decade ranked among the ten warmest on record. As Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said, “We are currently teetering on the edge of surpassing the 1.5 °C threshold set by the Paris Agreement, and the average over the last two years has already exceeded this level.” He added that high global temperatures, plus record atmospheric water vapor, produced unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall in 2024, causing suffering for millions of people. Meanwhile, the El Niño climate pattern warmed the Earth’s surface in the first half of the year, especially across a broad swath of the central and eastern Pacific, raising the global average surface temperature by about 0.2 °C.
Does This Mean the Paris Agreement Has Failed?
The Paris Agreement aims to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, so 2024’s numbers look grim. Humanity now faces a monumental task to keep warming well below 2 °C, let alone 1.5 °C. One key point: cumulative greenhouse gas emissions are roughly proportional to how much global temperatures rise. The faster we decarbonize the global economy, the sooner warming will stop and the impacts will be reduced. This year is unlikely to be as hot as 2024, because El Niño has passed. Unfortunately, record-high global temperatures are likely to continue for at least the next few decades.
