New data from Europe’s Copernicus climate service confirms that the Earth warmed above 1.5°C in 2024 – exceeding the limit agreed upon by world leaders 10 years ago. The findings indicate that global average temperatures for 2024 were around 1.6°C above the benchmark pre-industrial period.
However, the internationally agreed target has not been breached officially, since it refers to a figure averaged over decades.
More data from meteorological authorities such as the United Kingdom’s Met Office and NASA will be published by 17 January. The BBC notes that the information is “expected to agree that 2024 was the warmest on record, although precise figures vary slightly.”
Breach is “hard to predict” but “very close”
Record global temperatures have now been confirmed for the past ten years, from 2015 to 2024. Myles Allen, from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, stated: “When exactly we will cross the long-term 1.5°C threshold is hard to predict, but” we’re obviously very close now.
This means that the world must redouble its efforts to avoid the threshold being broken over the course of further years, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last week.
“We must exit this road to ruin – and we have no time to lose,” he said in a New Year rallying call that asked countries to bring down their so-called “greenhouse” gas emissions.
To what extent is El Niño a factor?
Some have noted that part of the spike in temperatures could be in part due to the effect of cyclical weather events such as El Niño, a phenomenon that weakens trade winds and pushes warm water toward the west coast of the American continent, moving the Pacific jet stream south and making the USA and Canada dryer and warmer, promoting wildfire conditions in places while causing floods elsewhere.
But Copernicus Deputy Director, Samantha Burgess, has placed the blame for the global record temperatures firmly on emissions caused by human behaviours. “By far and away the largest contribution impacting our climate is greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” she told the BBC.
As the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Burgess was reported by Belga news agency as saying: “We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5°C level defined in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above this level. These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapour levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people.”
