Europe’s climate monitor said on Monday that 2024 is “effectively certain” to be the hottest on record and the first year above a critical threshold to protect the planet from dangerous overheating.
“At this point, it is effectively certain that 2024 is going to be the warmest year on record,” the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a statement.
Meanwhile, unusually high temperatures are expected to persist for at least the first few months of 2025, according to EU scientists.
The European Union’s C3S data comes two weeks after UN climate talks reached a $300 billion deal to tackle climate change, a package to help poorer countries shoulder the rising costs of climate-related disasters. Declared insufficient to fulfill.
C3S said data from January to November confirmed that 2024 is now certain to be the warmest year on record, and the first in which average global temperatures have risen since the pre-industrial era of 1850-1900. is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The last warmest year on record was 2023.
In 2024, extreme weather swept the world, severe droughts in Italy and South America, deadly floods in Nepal, Sudan, and Europe, heat waves in Mexico, Mali, and Saudi Arabia that killed thousands, and the U.S. And the devastating typhoon in the Philippines.
Scientific studies have confirmed the fingerprints of human-caused climate change on all these disasters.
Last month was named the second warmest November on record after November 2023.
“We’re still in record high global temperature territory, and that’s likely to be for at least the next few months,” Julian Nicholls, a climate researcher at Copernicus, told Reuters.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.
Reducing emissions to net zero — as many governments have promised to eventually do — will stop global warming from getting worse. Yet despite these green promises, global CO2 emissions are set to hit record highs this year.
Scientists are also monitoring whether a La Niña weather pattern – which involves cooling sea surface temperatures – could form in 2025.
This may cool global temperatures briefly, although it will not stop the long-term underlying trend of warming due to emissions. After El Niño — La Nina’s warm counterpart — ended earlier this year, the world is currently in neutral conditions.
“While 2025 may be slightly cooler than 2024, if a La Niña event occurs, that does not mean temperatures are ‘safe’ or ‘normal,'” said Frederick Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London. “It will happen.”
“We will still experience higher temperatures, resulting in dangerous heat waves, droughts, wildfires and tropical storms.”
C3S records go back to the 1940s, and are cross-checked with global temperature records going back to the 1850s.