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Leading international organizations said global warming exceeded 1.5 degrees for the first time last year, as an “extraordinary” rise in average global temperatures sparked fears that climate change was accelerating faster than expected.
European observation 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’s goal of limiting warming since pre-industrial times to well below 2°C, and preferably to 1.5°C.
“Frankly, I’m running out of metaphors to explain the warming we’re experiencing,” said Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo.
He added that a spate of climate disasters last year – from floods to heatwaves – was not a statistical anomaly but was clearly linked to climate change caused by increases in carbon dioxide and methane.
According to Copernicus, the years 2015 to 2024 were the ten warmest 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 U.S. from the Paris Agreement to combat climate change.
Some companies around the world have also begun to weaken their climate targets and scale back green efforts.
“A temperature of 1.5°C is like watching the first domino fall in a devastating chain reaction,” said Patrick McGuire, a climate scientist at the University of Reading. “We are playing with fire. Every fraction of a degree triggers more intense storms, longer droughts and deadlier heatwaves.”
The latest data does not represent a definitive breach of the Paris Agreement, whose targets refer to temperature averages measured over more than two decades.
But concerns that climate change has accelerated have been fueled by evidence that the world’s oceans have cooled more slowly than expected following the natural warming effect of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean.
“The most striking thing is how much warmer 2024 and much 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 subject to larger and more persistent fluctuations.”
Human-caused climate change was the main cause of the 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 impact of cyclical El Niño. The beginning of one weak La Niña cooling cycle was confirmed by the US National Weather Service on Thursday.
But Samantha Burgess from 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 than that of our parents and grandparents,” she said, adding that it has probably been 125,000 years since temperatures were as hot as they are today.
Copernicus said 2024 would be the warmest year for all continental regions except Antarctica and Australasia, as well as for “significant parts” of the world’s oceans, particularly the North Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Western Pacific.
Global atmospheric water levels reached record levels in 2024, 5 percent above the 1991-2020 average, leading to “unprecedented heat waves and heavy rainfall that caused misery for millions of people,” Burgess said.
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