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The world breached 1.5C of warming last year for the first time, top international agencies said, as an “extraordinary” spike in the global average temperature sparked fears that climate change is accelerating faster than expected.
Europe’s Copernicus observation agency confirmed on Friday that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with average surface temperatures 1.6C above preindustrial levels after greenhouse gas emissions hit a new high.
It was the first calendar year that average temperatures surpassed the 2015 Paris accord target of limiting warming since pre-industrial times to well under 2C and preferably to 1.5C.
“Honestly, I am running out of metaphors to explain the warming we are seeing,” said Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo.
He added that a spate of climate disasters last year — ranging from floods to heatwaves — was not a statistical anomaly, but clearly linked to climate change driven by the rise in carbon dioxide and methane.
Copernicus said the years from 2015 to 2024 were the 10 warmest on record.
The co-ordinated release of 2024 data from six climate-monitoring organisations comes just days before president-elect Donald Trump is expected to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement to tackle climate change.
Some businesses around the world have also begun weakening climate targets and rolling back green efforts.
“Hitting 1.5C is like watching the first domino fall in a devastating chain reaction,” said Patrick McGuire, a climate researcher at Reading university. “We’re playing with fire. Every fraction of a degree unleashes 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 gained pace have been fanned by evidence that the world’s oceans have been slower to cool than expected after the naturally occurring El Niño warming effect on the Pacific Ocean.
What is “most striking is how much warmer 2024 and much of 2023 have been”, added Tim Lenton, chair in climate change and earth system science at Exeter university.
“This is a clear signal of destabilisation in the climate — a less stable system undergoes larger and more persistent fluctuations.”
Human-induced climate change was the main driver of the extreme air and sea surface temperatures in 2024, Copernicus said, while other factors such as El Niño, which officially came to an end last June, also contributed.
This year is expected to be cooler than 2024, partly because of the diminished impact of El Niño, which is cyclical. The onset of a weak La Niña cooling cycle was confirmed on Thursday by the US weather agency.
But Samantha Burgess, at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said it would still probably rank among the three hottest on record.
“We are now living in a very different climate than our parents and grandparents experienced,” she said, adding that it had probably been 125,000 years since temperatures had been as hot as they were today.
Copernicus said 2024 was the warmest year on the books for all continental regions, except Antarctica and Australasia, as well as for “sizeable parts” of the world’s oceans, particularly the north Atlantic, Indian and western Pacific oceans.
Global atmospheric water levels in 2024 reached record levels, at 5 per cent above the 1991-2020 average, fuelling “unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people”, Burgess said.
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