The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has announced that 2024 is “virtually certain” to surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record, marking a critical milestone in global climate history.
C3S Director Carlo Buontempo emphasized the gravity of the situation: “The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change. 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 announcement comes at a crucial moment, just days before the UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where nations will negotiate increased funding for climate change initiatives.
However, Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election has dampened expectations for the talks.
In a historic development, 2024 will be the first year where global temperatures exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), when widespread fossil fuel use began.
This threshold holds particular significance as it was the key target in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aimed to prevent global warming from surpassing this mark.
Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, expressed concern about this milestone: “The limits that were set in the Paris Agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world.”
She urged governments at COP29 to take stronger action against CO2-emitting fossil fuels.
Buontempo warned that reaching the Paris Agreement’s threshold is imminent: “It’s basically around the corner now.”
C3S projects that the world will consistently exceed the Paris goal around 2030.
The impact of rising temperatures has already manifested in devastating weather events.
October 2024 saw catastrophic flash floods in Spain, record-breaking wildfires in Peru, and severe flooding in Bangladesh that destroyed over one million tons of rice, triggering food price spikes. In the United States, Hurricane Milton’s intensity was amplified by human-caused climate change.
The C3S analysis, based on records dating back to 1940 and cross-referenced with global temperature data from 1850, shows that January to October temperatures were so elevated that only an unprecedented drop in temperature anomalies could prevent 2024 from becoming the hottest year on record.
[Source: Reuters]
