Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid.
And when last year is averaged with 2023, both years together also exceed that level of warming, which was noted as a red line marking dangerous climate change by 196 countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.
The temperature figures were seen as so significant that the new annual climate data for 2024 was presented Thursday night as part of the first-ever internationally coordinated release by several institutions that track global temperatures, in part to mark the “exceptional conditions experienced in 2024,” according to a report published today by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service.
On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the World Meteorological Organization will follow up with similar reports, all of which will emphasize not only the record global temperatures, but also the record amount of water vapor in the atmosphere that contributed to severe and record flooding in some parts of the world last year, and also helped supercharge tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
Rather than being fatigued by the barrage of news about heat records and other climate extremes, people should see the information as an opportunity to be thankful that we are not flying blind into dangerous climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Thanks to international science, “We do know something about what’s happening,” he said. “We can make some predictions about what’s coming in the future. So rather than being overwhelmed … we should also take this as an opportunity to do something about it, to react to and to inform our decisions in the best possible way with facts and evidence.”
Even with those facts, he added, “We are facing a very new climate and new challenges that our society is not prepared for. … This is a monumental challenge for society.”
According to the Copernicus data, 2024 didn’t just edge past the previous record-warm year, 2023, but surged more than a tenth of 1 degree Celsius all the way to 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8F) above the pre-industrial level. That was one of the biggest year-on-year jumps on record, said Samantha Burgess, co-director of Copernicus.
She said some of the other global datasets may actually still show the 2024 warming relative to the pre-industrial 1850-1900 average at just below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F), but that the global synthesis of six major datasets by the World Meteorological Organization will also come out to more than 1.5.
Still, she said, that doesn’t mean the limit set by the Paris Agreement has been broken, because it refers to a long-term average over 10 to 30 years.
If the 1.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the pre-industrial average doesn’t seem like a huge deal to some people, she said human bodies provide a good analogy.
“The temperature of the human body is around 37 [degrees Celsius],” she said. “If we have a fever at 39 degrees, it doesn’t sound like much, but the body responds in very negative ways, and we feel terrible. We’re feverish, and the body is doing everything possible to fight that infection.
“The reality is that at a global average change of 1.5 degrees, the frequency and the intensity of extreme events gets more likely,” she said. “Extreme events like wildfires, heat waves, severe storms, droughts, are likely to get more frequent, and they’re likely to be more intense. This is why, when you’ve got this small number but over a very large global average, it’s incredibly important.”
The Copernicus scientists said that the world’s oceans, in particular, were one of the biggest factors driving Earth’s overall annual temperature to a new record. That ocean warmth also had direct impacts like a global wave of coral bleaching and reef die-offs, as well as mass die-offs of marine mammals and seabirds.
On land, the persistently high global fever of the last few years led to deadly heat waves, with more than 47,000 heat-related deaths in Europe alone during 2023. Final figures for the number of such deaths in 2024 are yet to be calculated.
The new data on record warmth comes at a time when some governments and companies are already rolling back previous climate action pledges. The internationally coordinated release of global climate data could also be seen as an acknowledgment that global warming isn’t going to slow down and wait for humanity to solve other vexing social, political and economic problems.
Asked if those rollbacks in the face of record heat are worrying to him as a climate scientist, Buontempo said that, “From a physical point of view, the mechanism is well explained. What drives this warming temperature is, to a very large extent, increasing greenhouse gases.”
If the goal is to stabilize the global temperature, then governments need to move toward reducing emissions to zero “in the most rapid possible way,” he said.
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Bob Berwyn is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
