The world has just experienced the first full year in which global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times, scientists have said.
The milestone was confirmed by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Friday, 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 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.
This does not mean the internationally agreed 1.5C warming threshold has been permanently breached, but the C3S said that was drawing dangerously near.
“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.”
Last year eclipsed 2023’s 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 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.
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