It's official — 2024 warmest year on record globally, first to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial level

It’s official: 2024 was the warmest year across our burning planet since records began and the first year that saw temperatures flare past the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels.

This data has been crunched by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, underscoring what climate scientists and models have been forecasting for decades: the carbon emissions from our fossil fuel addiction are heating our world at an unprecedented rate.

The 1.5°C mark – reached in less than two centuries – is an ecological smoke signal that also has political and diplomatic significance.

The main goal of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate, reached in 2015, was to contain “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The planet has kept on cooking ever since.

“Each of the past 10 years (2015-2024) was one of the 10 warmest years on record,” Copernicus said in a statement.

“All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850. Humanity is in charge of its own destiny but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence. The future is in our hands – swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate,” said Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo.

According to Copernicus, some of the chilling highlights of the past hot year include:

• The monthly global average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for 11 months of the year. Going back further, all months since July 2023, except for July 2024, have exceeded the 1.5°C level.


• A new record high for daily global average temperature was reached on 22 July 2024, at 17.16°C.


• 2024 was the warmest year for all continental regions, except Antarctica and Australasia, as well as for sizeable parts of the ocean, particularly the North Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the western Pacific Ocean.


• 2024 saw three record warm seasons for the corresponding time of the year: boreal winter (December 2023-February 2024), boreal spring (March-May) and boreal summer (June-August) at 0.78°C, 0.68°C and 0.69°C respectively above the 1991-2020 average.


• The total amount of water vapour in the atmosphere reached a record value in 2024, at about 5% above the 1991-2020 average.

“The defining factor in the evolution of many key climate indicators in 2024 has been the increasing global temperature, which is largely associated with the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, a consequence of human activities,” Copernicus said.

Copernicus said carbon dioxide concentrations in 2024 were 2.9 parts per million (ppm) higher than what obtained in 2023, reaching 442 ppm – far above the mid-19th century levels of 290 ppm.

Blazing trails of misery

This caps a decade that has seen extreme weather events increasingly blaze trails of misery across the world.

In May 2016, the Canadian oil town of Fort McMurray was overrun by a raging wildfire that spread with unheard-of speed and intensity, forcing the evacuation of 90,000 people and inflicting billions of dollars in damage – ironically on the same industry that produced the weather conditions that spawned the inferno.

Los Angeles is now going up in smoke as wildfires burn out of control during what should be the wet season in southern California.

Southern Africa currently has historic levels of hunger with close to 30 million people in need of food aid in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and elsewhere after last summer’s El Niño event decimated crops.

In between, there has been a litany of wild weather events that have smashed previous records and brought devastation to the lives of millions of people and countless animals; and seen massive swathes of forest burn to the ground.

Fire tornadoes – a terrifying phenomenon never before recorded – made their first appearance in the past decade in Australia and California.

As John Vaillant notes in his recent gripping book about the Fort McMurray fire, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, humanity has become “... a super volcano representing the largest, most rapid release of combustive energy, carbon dioxide, and methane since the Permian Age”. The Permian Age was 300 to 250 million years ago and ended in a volcanic bang with the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Amid the haze from the smoke generated, one thing is clear: the global economy needs to decarbonise at a faster rate. DM