2024 was the first year to exceed the 1.5C warming limit

New data shows the planet is inching closer to warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, despite world leaders promising to try to avoid it a decade ago.

The European climate service Copernicus, one of the main global data providers, said on Friday that 2024 was the first calendar year to exceed the symbolic threshold, and also the hottest in the world.

This does not mean that the international target of 1.5C has been breached, because it refers to the long-term average over decades, but it brings us closer to it as fossil fuel emissions continue to warm the atmosphere.

Last week, UN chief Antonio Guterres described the recent record temperatures as a “climate failure”.

“We must get off this road to perdition – and we have no time to lose,” he said in his New Year’s message, calling on countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 2025.

According to Copernicus data, average global temperatures in 2024 were about 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – the time before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

this beats the record set in 2023 by just over 0.1C, meaning the last 10 years are now the 10 warmest years on record.

The Meta Bureau, NASA and other climate groups are due to release their own data later on Friday. Everyone is expected to agree that 2024 was the warmest year on record, although the exact numbers vary slightly.

Last year’s heatwave is largely due to human emissions of planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide, which are still at record high levels.

Natural weather patterns such as El Niño — when surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific become unusually warm — played a smaller role.

“By far the biggest influence on our climate is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told the BBC.

The 1.5C figure has become a powerful symbol in international climate talks since it was agreed in Paris in 2015, with many of the most vulnerable countries seeing it as a matter of survival.

The risks of climate change, such as extreme heat, rising sea levels and the loss of wildlife, will be much higher with 2C warming than with 1.5C warming. landmark UN report for 2018.

However, the world is getting closer to breaking the 1.5 degree barrier.

“Exactly when we will exceed the long-term threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius is difficult to predict, but we are clearly very close,” says Miles Allen of Oxford University’s Department of Physics and author of the UN report.

The current trajectory is likely to result in the world exceeding long-term warming by 1.5 degrees by the early 2030s. This would be politically significant, but it would not mean the end of the game for climate action.

“It’s not that 1.49 degrees Celsius is normal, it’s that 1.51 degrees Celsius is the apocalypse – every tenth of a degree matters and the climate consequences get worse with more warming,” explains Zeke Hausfater, a climate scientist from Berkeley Earth, a research group in the US.

Even fractions of a degree of global warming can cause more frequent and intense extreme weather conditions, such as heat and heavy rainfall.

In 2024, the world saw high temperatures in West Africalong drought in some areas of South Americaintense precipitation in Central Europe and some especially severe tropical storms reaching North America and South Asia.

These events were just one of them has become more intense due to climate change over the past year, according to the World Weather Attribution Group.

Even this week, as new data was released, Los Angeles was overwhelmed by devastating wildfires fueled by high winds and a lack of rain.

While there are many factors that contributed to this week’s events, Experts say favorable conditions for fires in California are becoming more likely in a warming world.

Not only the air temperature set new marks in 2024 global sea level also reached a new daily highwhile the total amount of moisture in the atmosphere reached record levels.

That the world is breaking new records is no surprise: 2024 was always expected to be hot due to the El Niño weather effect, which ended around last April – in addition to human-caused warming.

But several records in recent years have been less than expected, and some scientists fear that could signal an acceleration of warming.

“I think it’s safe to say that the temperatures in both 2023 and 2024 surprised most climate scientists – we didn’t think we’d see a year above 1.5C so early,” says Dr Hausfater.

“Since 2023, we have had an additional warming of about 0.2 degrees Celsius, which we cannot fully explain, on top of what we expected from climate change and El Niño,” agrees Helge Gösling, a climate physicist at Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

Various theories have been proposed to explain this “extra” heat, such as the apparent decrease in low-level cloudiness that tends to cool the planet, and continued ocean warmth after El Niño ends.

“The question is whether this acceleration is something persistent, related to human activity, which means we will have more drastic warming in the future, or whether it is part of natural variability,” adds Dr. Goesling.

“It’s very hard to say at this point.”

Despite these uncertainties, scientists stress that humans can still control the future climate, and drastic cuts in emissions could reduce the effects of warming.

“Even with 1.5 degrees outside the window, we can still limit warming to 1.6, 1.7 or 1.8 degrees this century,” says Dr Hausfater.

“It’s going to be much, much better than if we keep burning coal, oil and gas unabated and end up at 3 or 4C — it’s still really important.”