2024 was the warmest year on record: WMO
By Deepak Arora
GENEVA, Jan 10: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that the year that just passed -2024- was the warmest year on record, and that it is at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.
This is based on six various international datasets. It also said that the past 10 years, from 2015 to 2024, were the ten warmest years on record.
“We saw extraordinary land, sea surface temperatures, extraordinary ocean heat accompanied by very extreme weather affecting many countries around the world, destroying lives, livelihoods, hopes and dreams,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis said.
“We saw many climate change impacts retreating sea ice glaciers. It was an extraordinary year.”
Four of the six international datasets crunched by WMO indicated a higher than 1.5℃ global average increase for the whole of last year but two did not.
The 1.5℃ marker is significant because it was a key goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to ensure that global temperature change does not rise more than this above pre-industrial levels, while striving to hold the overall increase to well below 2℃.
The Paris Agreement is “not yet dead but in grave danger”, the WMO maintained, explaining that the accord’s long-term temperature goals are measured over decades, rather than individual years.
However, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo insisted that “climate history is playing out before our eyes. We’ve had not just one or two record-breaking years, but a full ten-year series. “It is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases the impacts on our lives, economies and our planet.”
Amid still raging deadly wildfires in Los Angeles that weather experts including the WMO insist have been exacerbated by climate change - with more days of dry, warm, windy weather on top of rains which boosted vegetation growth – the UN agency said that 2024 capped a decade-long “extraordinary streak of record-breaking temperatures”.
2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit
PARIS, Jan 10: The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C, new data shows, despite world leaders vowing a decade ago they would try to avoid this.
The European Copernicus climate service, one of the main global data providers, said on Friday that 2024 was the first calendar year to pass the symbolic threshold, as well as the world's hottest on record.
This does not mean the international 1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades, but does bring us nearer to doing so as fossil fuel emissions continue to heat the atmosphere.
Last week UN chief António Guterres described the recent run of temperature records as "climate breakdown".
"We must exit this road to ruin - and we have no time to lose," he said in his New Year message, calling for countries to slash emissions of planet-warming gases in 2025.
Bar chart of global average annual temperatures between 1940 and 2024. There is a rising trend, and 2024 shows the highest global average temperature of 1.6C, according to the European climate service. The hotter the year, the darker shade of red for the bars.
Global average temperatures for 2024 were around 1.6C above those of the pre-industrial period - the time before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels - according to Copernicus data.
This breaks the record set in 2023 by just over 0.1C, and means the last 10 years are now the 10 warmest years on record.
The Met Office, Nasa and other climate groups are due to release their own data later on Friday. All are expected to agree that 2024 was the warmest on record, although precise figures vary slightly.
Last year's heat is predominantly due to humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are still at record highs.
Natural weather patterns such as El Niño - where surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become unusually warm - played a smaller role.
"By far and away the largest contribution impacting our climate is greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere," said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus.
The 1.5C figure has become a powerful symbol in international climate negotiations ever since it was agreed in Paris in 2015, with many of the most vulnerable countries considering it a matter of survival.
The risks from climate change, such as intense heatwaves, rising sea-levels and loss of wildlife, would be much higher at 2C of warming than at 1.5C, according to a landmark UN report from 2018.
Yet the world has been moving closer and closer to breaching the 1.5C barrier.
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