2024 set to become the hottest year on record, warns EU climate service
The year 2024 is “virtually certain” to surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record, according to new data released by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Thursday. The announcement comes just days before the U.N. COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where world leaders are expected to negotiate crucial funding and policies to address climate change, though expectations for meaningful action have been dampened by political uncertainties, including the recent U.S. presidential election outcome.
C3S revealed that from January to October 2024, global temperatures have been so high that, barring an unlikely drop in temperatures for the remainder of the year, 2024 will definitively claim the title of the warmest year since records began. The record-breaking temperatures are primarily attributed to the ongoing trend of global warming driven by human activity.
“The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S. “The climate is warming, generally. It’s warming in all continents, in all ocean basins. So we are bound to see those records being broken.”
The data also marks a grim milestone: 2024 will be the first year in which the global average temperature is more than 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), a critical threshold established in the 2015 Paris Agreement as the upper limit for avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, expressed concern about the pace of global climate action. “The limits that were set in the Paris Agreement are starting to crumble,” she said, urging stronger efforts to transition economies away from fossil fuels. “The too-slow pace of climate action across the world is failing to meet the urgency of the crisis.”
While the world has not yet breached the 1.5°C warming target over long-term averages, C3S predicts that this threshold could be exceeded as early as 2030 if current trends continue. “It’s basically around the corner now,” Buontempo warned.
The consequences of the record-breaking heat have already been felt globally. In October, extreme weather events caused widespread destruction, including flash floods in Spain that killed hundreds, devastating wildfires in Peru, and flooding in Bangladesh that destroyed over a million tons of rice, further driving up food prices. In the U.S., Hurricane Milton was exacerbated by climate change, underscoring the growing link between rising temperatures and more intense, frequent extreme weather events.
C3S’s climate data, which goes back to 1940, is cross-checked with global temperature records dating back to 1850, providing a clear and consistent record of the planet’s warming trajectory.
As world leaders prepare for the COP29 summit next week, the urgency of addressing climate change is more pressing than ever. However, the political landscape remains uncertain, with many activists and scientists calling for more decisive and rapid action to avoid breaching the 1.5°C threshold within the next decade.
