It is now official: after confirmation by all temperatures until December 31, 2024 is indeed the hottest year ever measured on Earth since 1850. During the year 2024 alone, but also on the average of the two years 2023-2024, the world exceeded 1.5° C of warming compared to the pre-industrial era, testifying to an unprecedented rise in temperatures in the recent history of humanity, announced Friday January 10 the European Copernicus Observatory.
This does not mean, however, that the most ambitious limit of the Paris agreement – observed over at least 20 years – has been crossed, recalls Copernicus. But “it underscores the fact that global temperatures are rising beyond what modern humans have experienced.” Indeed, the current warming of the climate has not been seen for at least 120,000 years, according to scientists. “Each year of the last decade has been one of the ten hottest on record,” warns Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S at Copernicus.
This warming “should alarm us all,” responded the British minister responsible for carbon neutrality, Ed Miliband, on Friday. “Hiding our heads in the sand would be a betrayal for future generations,” he said on X. But “we have the answers to confront this existential threat,” he added, believing that “the despair is not an option.”
“A serious warning”
This is a “serious warning”, also judges Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “We have had a taste of a 1.5°C world, with unprecedented suffering and economic costs for people and the global economy, due to human-enhanced extreme events like droughts, floods, fires and storms,” he told AFP.
Behind these figures is already a series of disasters exacerbated by climate change: 1,300 deaths in June during extreme heat during the pilgrimage to Mecca, historic floods in West and Central Africa, violent hurricanes in the United States and Caribbean… And today the fires in Los Angeles, “the most devastating” in the history of California, in the words of President Joe Biden. Economically, natural disasters caused $320 billion in losses worldwide last year, according to reinsurer Munich Re.
Containing warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C – the upper limit of the Paris agreement – would significantly limit its most catastrophic consequences, according to the IPCC, the climate experts mandated by the UN .
Overheating oceans
The oceans, which absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by humanity, also continued to overheat. The annual average of their surface temperatures – excluding polar zones – reached the unprecedented level of 220.87°C, beating the 2023 record.
In addition to the immediate impacts of marine heatwaves on corals or fish, this lasting overheating of the oceans, the main regulator of the earth’s climate, affects marine and atmospheric currents. Warmer seas release more water vapor into the atmosphere, providing additional energy for typhoons, hurricanes or storms. Copernicus reports that the level of water vapor in the atmosphere has reached a record level in 2024, standing around 5% above the 1991-2020 average.
However, the past year saw the end of the natural El Niño phenomenon, which induces global warming and an increase in certain extreme events, and a transition towards neutral conditions or the opposite phenomenon, La Niña. The World Meteorological Organization already warned in December that the latter would be “short and of low intensity” and insufficient to offset the effects of warming.
“The future is in our hands – rapid and decisive action can always deviate the trajectory of our future climate,” emphasizes Copernicus Climate Change Director Carlo Buontempo.
There COP29 in Baku, the last major UN climate conference, struggled to come up with a new objective for climate finance in November but remained almost silent on ambitions to reduce greenhouse gases, and in particularly the exit from fossil fuels.