2024 is “virtually certain” to be the hottest year in recorded history and the first to exceed the warming limit that scientists agree the planet must stay beneath to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that monitors warming trends, said this year is on track to exceed 2023 as the warmest on record after a blistering October.
“After 10 months of 2024, it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year of more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels,” Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of Copernicus, said in a statement. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29.”
Scientists have long said warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels must be avoided. Beyond that point, researchers have warned of catastrophic impacts to extreme weather, sea level rise, biodiversity and food production.
While 2024 may come in above that warming threshold, that does not mean it has been breached permanently. The terms of the Paris climate agreement state that the planet must warm by 1.5 C or more over a 20-year period.
“It’s not good news, but it doesn’t mean we’ve broken the agreement,” Burgess told The New York Times this week.
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World dignitaries and climate envoys are set to meet in Azerbaijan next week for the United Nations’ climate summit, known as COP29, where they will hash out new efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and limit planetary warming. But those efforts got exponentially harder with the ascension of President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to revert the United States back to an era of rampant fossil fuel expansion and withdraw the country, once again, from the Paris deal.
“Climate calamity is the new reality. And we’re not keeping up,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement this week after the U.N. Environment Program released a new report that found there has not been enough funding to adapt to a warming world. “Earth’s ablaze. And humanity’s exposed.”