2024 saw three record-warm seasons, a new record high for daily global average temperature, and an average of 41 additional days of “dangerous heat” worldwide.
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Earth’s temperature hit new milestones in 2024: reaching record-breaking levels and rising to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
That last year was going to be the warmest on record became clear a few months ago, when global temperatures did not fall as predicted after El Niño subsided last June. The weather pattern, which is associated with the warming of sea surface temperatures in the central-east equatorial Pacific, pushed global temperatures “off the charts” in 2023, making it the hottest year on record.
But while conditions in the equatorial Pacific returned to normal mid last year, global temperatures did not.
“All of us who made projections at the start of the year underestimated just how warm 2024 would be,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth.
Instead, 2024 saw its hottest boreal winter (December 2023-February 2024), boreal spring (March-May) and boreal summer (June-August) on record, a new record high for daily global average temperature, and an average of 41 additional days of “dangerous heat” worldwide.
No countries was spared by the heat, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service’s end-of-year analysis, with all continental regions except Antarctica and Australasia recording their warmest year. As Yoko Tsushima, a climate scientist at the UK’s Met Office, remarked in an article on Nature, “[t]he warming is almost everywhere.”
Sea surface temperatures remained at record highs from January to June, following the trend from late 2023. In the latter half of 2024, the temperatures were the second-warmest on record for that time of year, after the previous year.
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Breaching the Paris Goal
On Friday, the EU’s Earth observation programme also confirmed another earlier prediction: that 2024 marked the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5C above its pre-industrial level.
The critical 1.5C threshold was established at the 2015 COP21 climate summit, when 196 parties signed the legally binding Paris Agreement. They agreed to keep limiting global warming to below 1.5C or “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Beyond this limit, experts warn that critical tipping points will be breached, leading to devastating and potentially irreversible consequences for several vital Earth systems that sustain a hospitable planet.
But temperatures in 2024 were consistently higher than the Paris threshold, with the exception of July. The average for the year stood at 1.60C above pre-industrial levels.
While this does not signal a permanent breach of the critical limit, which scientists say is measured over decades, it sends a clear warning to humanity that we are approaching the point of no return much faster than expected.
Last year, the World Meteorological Organization warned that the world is “more likely than not” to surpass the critical global warming threshold by 2027.
As Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, put it, “We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5ºC level defined in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above this level.”
Greenhouse Gases
In 2024, greenhouse gases saw their highest annual atmospheric levels ever recorded.
Carbon dioxide concentrations reached 422 ppm, 2.9 ppm higher than in 2023.
A by-product of burning fossil fuels, biomass, land-use changes, and industrial processes such as cement production, CO2 is the principal anthropogenic greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, responsible for about three-quarters of planet-warming emissions. Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have increased by more than 60% since 1990, with concentrations in the atmosphere now 50% higher than they were before the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
Meanwhile, methane concentrations reached 1897 ppb, 4 ppb higher than 2023.
The gas – mainly associated with fossil fuel use, agriculture and waste – is the second major greenhouse gas after CO2, responsible for 25% of global warming. It is 84 times more potent in trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2 over a two-decade period and it possesses a 100-year global warming potential 28-34 times that of CO2.
Global methane emissions have been on the rise and atmospheric concentrations of the potent gas are now more than 165% higher than pre-industrial levels.
The burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity and heat is the single-largest source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These are the primary drivers of global warming as they trap heat in the atmosphere and raising Earth’s surface temperature.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged countries to halt new gas and oil field projects, arguing that this is the only way to keep the 1.5C-compatible net-zero emissions scenario alive.
Extreme Weather Events Are Getting More Frequent and Intense
Copernicus also concluded that 2024 was the year with the highest atmospheric water vapour content on record. As atmospheric water vapour levels increase, heavy rainfall events will become more intense.
Combined with record heat in the oceans, the abundant supply of moisture contributed to the development of major storms, including tropical cyclones.
In the Atlantic, all hurricanes that occurred between June and November were intensified by climate change-driven ocean warming, an attribution analysis concluded.
The same study also concluded that hurricanes in the past five years “were 8.3 mph (13.4 km/h) faster, on average, than they would have been in a world without climate change.”
Attribution studies quantify climate change’s influence on an individual weather event, often in the immediate aftermath of a heatwave, storm, or flood. Often, these scientific analyses highlight how much more rare it would be for such an event to occur in “a world without climate change.”
“Humanity is in charge of its own destiny but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence,” said Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The future is in our hands – swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.”
Featured image: Kyle Lam/hongkongfp.com.
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