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The country recorded its own the hottest year sometime in 2024, with a jump so large that the planet temporarily passed prime climate threshold, several weather monitoring agencies announced on Friday.
Last year’s global average temperature easily exceeded the record heat of 2023 and has continued to increase even more. It has exceeded the long-term limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since the late 1800s, as required by the 2015 Paris Climate Pact, according to the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Service, the UK Met Office and the Japan Meteorological Agency agency.
The European team calculated a warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.89 degrees Fahrenheit). Japan found 1.57 degrees Celsius (2.83 degrees Fahrenheit) and Britain 1.53 degrees Celsius (2.75 degrees Fahrenheit) in a data release coordinated early Friday morning European time.
The US observing teams – NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and private Berkeley Earth – were due to release their data later on Friday, but all are likely to show record heat for 2024, European scientists said. The six groups compensate in different ways for data gaps in observations going back to 1850, which is why the numbers vary slightly.
“The primary reason for these record temperatures is the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” from burning coal, oil and gas, said Samantha Burgess, climate strategy lead at Copernicus. “As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures continue to rise, including in the oceans, sea levels continue to rise, and glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt.”
Last year’s temperature eclipsed the 2023 temperature in the European database by an eighth of a degree Celsius (more than a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit). That’s an unusually large jump; until the last few super-hot years, global temperature records were exceeded by only hundredths of a degree, scientists said.
The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record and are likely the warmest in 125,000 years, Burgess said.
July 10 was the hottest day on record by humans, with a global average temperature of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.89 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus found.
By far the biggest contributor to record warming is the burning of fossil fuels, several scientists said. A temporary natural El Nino warming of the central Pacific added a small amount, and the 2022 undersea volcanic eruption ended up cooling the atmosphere by putting more reflective particles into the atmosphere as well as water vapor, Burgess said.
“This is a warning light going on on Earth’s dashboard that needs immediate attention,” said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd. “Hurricane Helena, floods in Spain, and weather events fueling wildfires in California are symptoms of this unfortunate climate change rate. We have a few more gears.”
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“The alarm bells associated with climate change are ringing almost constantly, which can cause the public to become numb to the urgency, like police sirens in New York,” said Jennifer Francis, a scientist at the Woodwell Center for Climate Research. “However, in the case of climate, the alarms are getting louder and the emergencies now go far beyond just temperature.”
There were 27 weather events in the United States that caused at least $1 billion in damage, just one shy of the record set in 2023, according to NOAA. The US cost of those disasters was $182.7 billion. Hurricane Helena was the costliest and deadliest of the year with at least 219 deaths and $79.6 billion in damage.
“In the 1980s, Americans experienced an average of more than a billion weather and climate disasters every four months,” Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said in an email about NOAA’s inflation-adjusted numbers. “Now there’s one every three weeks — and we already have the first one in 2025, even though it’s only 9 days into the year.”
“Accelerating global temperature increases mean greater damage to property and impacts on human health and the ecosystems we depend on,” said University of Arizona water scientist Kathy Jacobs.
The world is crossing the main threshold
This is the first time any year has crossed the 1.5 degree threshold, except for Berkeley Earth’s 2023 measurements, which were originally funded by philanthropists who were skeptical of global warming.
Scientists were quick to point out that the 1.5 target is for long-term warming, now defined as the 20-year average. Long-term warming since pre-industrial times is now 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit).
“The 1.5 degree C threshold is not just a number – it’s a red flag. Exceeding even one year shows how dangerously close we are to breaking through the limits set by the Paris Agreement,” Northern Illinois University climatologist Victor Gensini said in an email. A comprehensive 2018 United Nations study found that keeping the Earth’s temperature rise below 1, 5 degrees Celsius could save coral reefs from extinction, prevent the massive loss of the Antarctic ice sheet and prevent the death and suffering of many people.
Francis called the threshold “dead in the water.”
Burgess called it highly likely that the Earth will exceed the 1.5 degree threshold, but called the Paris Agreement “an extremely important international policy” that nations around the world should remain committed to.
European and British calculations show that with a cooling La Nina instead of last year’s increasingly warm El Nino, 2025 is unlikely to be as hot as 2024. They predict it will turn out to be the third warmest. However, the first six days of January — despite cold temperatures in the eastern US — were slightly warmer on average and the warmest start to the year on record, according to Copernicus data.
Scientists are still divided on whether global warming is accelerating.
There is not enough data to see an acceleration of atmospheric warming, but it appears that the heat content of the oceans is not only increasing, but also increasing faster, said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.
“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges — climate challenges that our society is not prepared for,” Buontempo said.
All of this is like watching the end of a “dystopian sci-fi movie,” said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. “Now we are reaping what we have sown.”
