The European climate service Copernicus reports that the rate of global warming is increasing. The year 2024 was the hottest year on record, BBC reports.
According to Copernicus, the average global temperature in 2024 was about 1.6°C higher than in the pre-industrial period, when humanity had not yet begun to actively burn fuel. In 2023, the figure was just under 1.5°C.
In 2015, many countries agreed that the 1.5°C threshold is critical and unacceptable. For many countries, it may become a matter of survival. However, it is worth noting that we are talking about the average warming rate over a decade, not a single annual figure.
Last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the recent series of temperature records a “climate collapse.”
“We must exit this road to ruin – and we have no time to lose,” Guterres said, urging countries to reduce emissions of gases that lead to a warming planet.
Other climate monitoring companies are also expected to release their results. All of them are expected to confirm that 2024 was the warmest year on record.
“When exactly we will cross the long-term 1.5C threshold is hard to predict, but we’re obviously very close now,” says Oxford University scholar Myles Allen.
On the current trajectory, the world is likely to cross the 1.5°C threshold of long-term warming by the early 2030s.
Even small changes in global warming can lead to more frequent and powerful extreme weather events, such as extreme heat and heavy rainfall.
In 2024, the world experienced high temperatures in western Africa, prolonged drought in some regions of South America, heavy rains in Central Europe, and several powerful tropical storms in North America and South Asia.
Even this week, when the new data was released, Los Angeles was gripped by devastating wildfires fueled by high winds and lack of rain.
In 2024, it wasn’t just air temperatures that set new records. The surface of the world’s oceans also reached a new daily high, and the total amount of moisture in the atmosphere reached a record high.
“Since 2023 we’ve had around 0.2C of extra warming that we can’t fully explain,” says Helge Gößling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute.
Various theories have been put forward to explain this “extra” heat, including a marked decrease in low-level clouds, which usually contribute to the cooling of the planet, and the continued heating of the ocean after the end of the El Niño phenomenon.
“The question is whether this acceleration is something persistent linked to human activities that means we will have steeper warming in the future, or whether it is a part of natural variability,” Gößling continues.
Despite the uncertainty, scientists emphasize that humanity still has control over the future climate, and a sharp reduction in emissions can reduce the effects of warming.
Loading comments …