Earth on track for hottest year in recorded history, passing critical 1.5º warming threshold

The Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union organization that monitors global heating, announced on Thursday that the year 2024 will be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels. That means humanity has passed a critical threshold established in 2015 in the Paris climate accord.

“After 10 months of 2024 it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year of more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels according to the ERA5 dataset,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), said in a statement. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29.”

“This latest record sends another stark warning to governments at COP29 of the urgent need for action to limit any further warming,” says Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, told the BBC.

The EU agency announced this moment as nations all over the world gather in the Azerbaijani city of Baku for the 29th Conference of the Parties. The ERA5 dataset found that global temperatures in 2024 were on average 1.55 degrees Celsius higher than the 1.48 degrees threshold measured in 2023. The report also noted that climate change-fueled major weather events in 2024 such as torrential floods in Spain and rapidly melting Antarctic sea ice.

Speaking to Salon in August, Dr. Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology, warned that passing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold would be a devastating benchmark.

“A year above 1.5 degrees Celsius is unprecedented in human history,” Caldeira said. “Nevertheless, it is important to remember that each carbon dioxide emission causes another increment of global warming and so each emission avoided is an increment of global warming avoided.”

With the recent reelection of Donald Trump, the United States is expected to renege on its recent commitments to protect the planet, as climate change experts express alarm over his denial of climate science and his history of eroding environmental protections. At the same time, the United States is not the primary culprit behind greenhouse gas emissions.

“There has been considerable progress in cutting carbon emissions in several countries, such as the United States, but those cuts are lost in the increases by the two most populous countries: China and India,” Dr. Kevin Trenberth — a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, worked for the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and has published more than 600 articles on climatology — told Salon in July. “Population matters. While developing countries continue to improve their standards of living, especially by bringing electricity to all, this should be done using renewable energy rather than burning coal, oil and gas. Because of the downstream effects on climate change, the real costs of using fossil fuels have not been properly appreciated. Indeed, there is a great need to decarbonize the economy of all nations and put an appropriate price on carbon emissions.”