BRUSSELS (AP) - Europe’s climate service said on Friday that 2024 was the hottest calendar year on record and the first in which average temperatures exceeded the key limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial times, raising the importance of efforts to protect people from dangerous impacts.
The confirmation – widely trailed before the announcement – came as wildfires made worse by drought conditions rampaged across Los Angeles, causing at least 10 deaths, large-scale evacuations and panic in Hollywood, the affluent center of the U.S. film industry.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said that all of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850. That individual year reached 1.6C above an estimate of pre-industrial temperatures.
Each year in the last decade is one of the ten warmest on record, C3S added – in line with what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently described as “a decade of deadly heat” and “climate breakdown – in real time”.
C3S director Carlo Buontempo emphasized that “the underlying physics is very clear”, with the world’s warmer air and seas leading to more frequent and intense extreme events – from heatwaves to heavier rainfall and more destructive storms.
As a result, he said, “our traditional system to cope with and respond to extreme climate events is being tested to the limits. This is why adaptation is no longer an option – but a necessity.”
Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs Copernicus, said the global temperature over the past two years – averaging 1.54C – had surpassed the internationally agreed aim of keeping warming to 1.5C, as set out in the 2015 Paris climate pact.
“We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5C level defined in the Paris Agreement,” she said – although C3S emphasised that does not mean the flagship goal has been lost as it refers to an average over a period of at least 20 years.