In recent months, climate catastrophes have relentlessly struck the planet, from floods in Valencia, Spain, to hurricanes in the United States, to be described with a whole range of superlatives. Two new records have come to flesh out our image of 2024 as a climatically exceptional year: Firstly, it is on course to be the hottest ever observed, ahead of 2023; and it will also be the first year in which global warming exceeds the pre-industrial period by 1.5°C. As a result, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is issuing "a Red Alert [the maximum] at the sheer pace of climate change in a single generation," in its provisional report on the state of the climate in 2024 published on Monday, November 11.
From January to September 2024, the global mean surface air temperature exceeded the pre-industrial average by 1.54°C, according to the UN body, which synthesizes six international data sets (European Copernicus Institute, NASA, etc.), and which will confirm its estimates in January 2025. For 16 consecutive months (from June 2023 to September 2024), the global average temperature has beaten all previous records, often by far. The last 10 years have also been the hottest on record. "2024 marks a historic turning point. We're on the high and expected trend of climate change," reacted climatologist Christophe Cassou.
Such a surge in temperatures is due to greenhouse gas emissions linked to human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), to which an El Niño period has been added. This natural phenomenon, linked to warming in the equatorial Pacific from June 2023 to June 2024, has pushed up the global thermometer and fuelled numerous extreme weather events.
"As monthly and annual warming temporarily surpass 1.5°C, it is important to emphasize that this does NOT mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement goal," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement.
The most ambitious goal in the international treaty, which also aims to keep global temperatures well below 2°C, is to be measured over a long period, of around 20 years, and not for one or more individual years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has assessed that this threshold will be definitively crossed in the early 2030s. "The ambitions of the Paris Agreement are in great peril," warned the WMO.
"We're in uncharted waters here, as our current climate regime is so different from that of the 20th century," warned Sonia Seneviratne, a Swiss climatologist at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and vice-chair of IPCC Working Group 1. "The urgent thing is to limit the rise to as close to 1.5°C as possible, because beyond that, the probability of reaching global or regional climate tipping points increases." For the moment, governments are a long way from achieving this: Their current policies, which are totally inadequate, put the planet on a warming trajectory of 3.1°C by the end of the century, according to the UN.
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