2024 was the warmest year on record and the first calendar year where the global temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
Scientists had suspected 2024 would clinch the record and now it has been confirmed.
Each of the last 10 years – from 2015 to 2024 – was one of the 10 warmest on record, according to the EU climate monitoring service. Its 2024 Global Climate Highlights report outlines the exceptional conditions the world experienced last year.
“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,” says Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
“These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapour levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people.”
Europe saw extreme weather sweep the continent throughout the year, with hundreds of lives lost in disasters like the Valencia floods, Storm Boris and sweltering summer heatwaves in the Mediterranean.
What does this mean for the 1.5C Paris Agreement limit?
The report confirms that last year was the first year where temperature averages exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial times. The two-year average from 2023 to 2024 also exceeds this threshold.
The limit set by the Paris Agreement refers to temperature anomalies averaged over at least 20 years so this hasn’t yet been broken. The data, however, underscores that global temperatures are now rising beyond what modern humans have ever experienced before.
“Hopefully that is really a wake-up call for humanity,” says professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) vice chair Diana Urge-Vorsatz.
Currently, the IPCC believes we’ll exceed the Paris Agreement limit around the early 2030s.
“There is a very intense debate going on among the climate scientist community about whether global warming is accelerating or not due to these really extreme temperatures in the last two years,” Urge-Vorsatz notes.
Some have theorised that a reduction in air pollution may have been reflecting solar radiation and masking the true extent of global warming. Global warming itself might be reducing low-level cloud cover causing temperatures to rise.
A multitude of other factors that play a role in our complex global climate system could also be to blame for what appears to be an acceleration in warming.
On the other side of the debate, scientists see this “blip” as falling within projections for global warming.
“A lot of scientists do feel that actually the previous climate models still fully explain this,” Urge-Vorsatz says.
“There is no consensus on this yet,” she emphasises.
“We will only know in a few years whether this was just a natural variability blip or it is due to some phenomena that we have not yet understood.”
Did record temperature fuel 2024’s deadly weather?
Last year brought a plethora of deadly extreme weather events around the world from severe storms to flooding, drought, heatwaves and wildfires. As these events become increasingly frequent and intense, people’s lives and livelihoods across the globe are threatened.
In 2024, the total amount of water vapour in the atmosphere reached a record high – around 5 per cent higher than the average from 1991 to 2020 and significantly higher than in 2023.
“The majority of the excess heat that we have been trapping as a result of the greenhouse effect and human activities has been absorbed by the oceans,” says Urge-Vorsatz, “and ocean heat content has been increasing very alarmingly.”
