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"Global Warming Surges Well Past 1.5-Degree Mark in 2024" originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.
Summary
In 2024, human-caused global warming led to Earth’s average surface temperature exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first full calendar year. This milestone, noted by 196 countries in the Paris Agreement, marks a significant and alarming shift in climate conditions.
The data, released through a coordinated effort by several climate institutions, highlights exceptional weather patterns and climate extremes, including severe flooding and intense tropical storms, exacerbated by record amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere. Experts stress that while the situation is dire, it also presents an opportunity to leverage scientific knowledge for proactive climate action.
Highlights
- 🌍 Record Warming: In 2024, global temperatures surpassed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in history.
- 📊 Data Collaboration: The climate data for 2024 was released through an unprecedented international collaboration among major climate institutions.
- 🌧️ Severe Weather Patterns: The record temperatures contributed to extreme weather events, including severe flooding and intensified tropical storms.
- 🦠 Analogy of Human Health: The rise in global temperature is likened to a fever in humans, where even a small increase can lead to severe consequences.
- 📉 Need for Urgent Action: Experts emphasize the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to stabilize global temperatures.
- 🚧 Rollback of Climate Pledges: Some governments are reversing previous climate commitments, raising concerns among climate scientists.
- 🤝 Public Engagement: The report encourages the public to engage with climate data as a call to action rather than a source of despair.
International agencies coordinate release of annual climate data to highlight the past year’s “exceptional”—and dangerous—climate conditions.
By Bob Berwyn
Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid.
And when last year is averaged with 2023, both years together also exceed that level of warming, which was noted as a red line marking dangerous climate change by 196 countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.
[…]
According to the Copernicus data, 2024 didn’t just edge past the previous record-warm year, 2023, but surged more than a tenth of 1 degree Celsius all the way to 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8F) above the pre-industrial level. That was one of the biggest year-on-year jumps on record, said Samantha Burgess, co-director of Copernicus.
Read the full post at Inside Climate News.
