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Monday, July 7, 2025

Earth records hottest year ever in 2024 and the jump was so big it breached a key threshold

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177 days ago
20250110
FILE - A child holds an electric fan as they react to the heat during a visit to the Forbidden City in Beijing, July 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)

FILE - A child holds an electric fan as they react to the heat during a visit to the Forbidden City in Beijing, July 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)

Andy Wong

Earth record­ed its hottest year ever in 2024, with such a big jump that the plan­et tem­porar­i­ly passed a ma­jor cli­mate thresh­old, sev­er­al weath­er mon­i­tor­ing agen­cies an­nounced Fri­day.

Last year’s glob­al av­er­age tem­per­a­ture eas­i­ly passed 2023’s record heat and kept push­ing even high­er. It sur­passed the long-term warm­ing lim­it of 1.5 de­grees Cel­sius (2.7 de­grees Fahren­heit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris cli­mate pact, ac­cord­ing to the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion’s Coper­ni­cus Cli­mate Ser­vice, the Unit­ed King­dom’s Me­te­o­rol­o­gy Of­fice and Japan’s weath­er agency.

The Eu­ro­pean team cal­cu­lat­ed 1.6 de­grees Cel­sius (2.89 de­grees Fahren­heit) of warm­ing. Japan found 1.57 de­grees Cel­sius (2.83 de­grees Fahren­heit) and the British 1.53 de­grees Cel­sius (2.75 de­grees Fahren­heit) in re­leas­es of da­ta co­or­di­nat­ed to ear­ly Fri­day morn­ing Eu­ro­pean time.

Amer­i­can mon­i­tor­ing teams — NASA, the Na­tion­al Ocean­ic and At­mos­pher­ic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and the pri­vate Berke­ley Earth — were to re­lease their fig­ures lat­er Fri­day but all will like­ly show record heat for 2024, Eu­ro­pean sci­en­tists said. The six groups com­pen­sate for da­ta gaps in ob­ser­va­tions that go back to 1850 — in dif­fer­ent ways, which is why num­bers vary slight­ly.

“The pri­ma­ry rea­son for these record tem­per­a­tures is the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of green­house gas­es in the at­mos­phere” from the burn­ing of coal, oil and gas, said Saman­tha Burgess, strate­gic cli­mate lead at Coper­ni­cus. “As green­house gas­es con­tin­ue to ac­cu­mu­late in the at­mos­phere, tem­per­a­tures con­tin­ue to in­crease, in­clud­ing in the ocean, sea lev­els con­tin­ue to rise, and glac­i­ers and ice sheets con­tin­ue to melt.”

Last year eclipsed 2023’s tem­per­a­ture in the Eu­ro­pean data­base by an eighth of a de­gree Cel­sius (more than a fifth of a de­gree Fahren­heit). That’s an un­usu­al­ly large jump; un­til the last cou­ple of su­per-hot years, glob­al tem­per­a­ture records were ex­ceed­ed on­ly by hun­dredths of a de­gree, sci­en­tists said.

The last 10 years are the 10 hottest on record and are like­ly the hottest in 125,000 years, Burgess said.

Ju­ly 10 was the hottest day record­ed by hu­mans, with the globe av­er­ag­ing 17.16 de­grees Cel­sius (62.89 de­grees Fahren­heit), Coper­ni­cus found.

By far the biggest con­trib­u­tor to record warm­ing is the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els, sev­er­al sci­en­tists said. A tem­po­rary nat­ur­al El Ni­no warm­ing of the cen­tral Pa­cif­ic added a small amount and an un­der­sea vol­canic erup­tion in 2022 end­ed up cool­ing the at­mos­phere be­cause it put more re­flect­ing par­ti­cles in the at­mos­phere as well as wa­ter va­por, Burgess said. —(AP)

 

Alarm bells are ring­ing

 

“This is a warn­ing light go­ing off on the Earth’s dash­board that im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion is need­ed,’' said Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia me­te­o­rol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Mar­shall Shep­herd. ”Hur­ri­cane He­lene, floods in Spain and the weath­er whiplash fu­el­ing wild­fires in Cal­i­for­nia are symp­toms of this un­for­tu­nate cli­mate gear shift. We still have a few gears to go.”

“Cli­mate-change-re­lat­ed alarm bells have been ring­ing al­most con­stant­ly, which may be caus­ing the pub­lic to be­come numb to the ur­gency, like po­lice sirens in New York City,” Wood­well Cli­mate Re­search Cen­ter sci­en­tist Jen­nifer Fran­cis said. “In the case of the cli­mate, though, the alarms are get­ting loud­er, and the emer­gen­cies are now way be­yond just tem­per­a­ture.”

There were 27 weath­er dis­as­ters in the Unit­ed States that caused at least $1 bil­lion in dam­age, just one few­er than the record set in 2023, ac­cord­ing to NOAA. The U.S. cost of those dis­as­ters was $182.7 bil­lion. Hur­ri­cane He­lene was the costli­est and dead­liest of the year with at least 219 deaths and $79.6 bil­lion in dam­age.

“In the 1980s, Amer­i­cans ex­pe­ri­enced one bil­lion-plus weath­er and cli­mate dis­as­ter on av­er­age every four months,” Texas Tech cli­mate sci­en­tist Katharine Hay­hoe said in an email about NOAA’s in­fla­tion-ad­just­ed fig­ures. “Now, there’s one every three weeks —and we al­ready have the first of 2025 even though we’re on­ly 9 days in­to the year.”

“The ac­cel­er­a­tion of glob­al tem­per­a­ture in­creas­es means more dam­age to prop­er­ty and im­pacts on hu­man health and the ecosys­tems we de­pend on,” said Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona wa­ter sci­en­tist Kathy Ja­cobs.

 

World breach­es ma­jor thresh­old

 

This is the first time any year passed the 1.5-de­gree thresh­old, ex­cept for a 2023 mea­sure­ment by Berke­ley Earth, which was orig­i­nal­ly fund­ed by phil­an­thropists who were scep­ti­cal of glob­al warm­ing.

Sci­en­tists were quick to point out that the 1.5 goal is for long-term warm­ing, now de­fined as a 20-year av­er­age. Warm­ing since pre-in­dus­tri­al times over the long term is now at 1.3 de­grees Cel­sius (2.3 de­grees Fahren­heit).

“The 1.5 de­gree C thresh­old isn’t just a num­ber — it’s a red flag. Sur­pass­ing it even for a sin­gle year shows how per­ilous­ly close we are to breach­ing the lim­its set by the Paris Agree­ment,” North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty cli­mate sci­en­tist Vic­tor Gensi­ni said in an email. A 2018 mas­sive Unit­ed Na­tions study found that keep­ing Earth’s tem­per­a­ture rise be­low 1.5 de­grees Cel­sius could save coral reefs from go­ing ex­tinct, keep mas­sive ice sheet loss in Antarc­ti­ca at bay and pre­vent many peo­ple’s death and suf­fer­ing.

Fran­cis called the thresh­old “dead in the wa­ter.”

Burgess called it ex­treme­ly like­ly that Earth will over­shoot the 1.5-de­gree thresh­old, but called the Paris Agree­ment “ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly im­por­tant in­ter­na­tion­al pol­i­cy” that na­tions around the world should re­main com­mit­ted to.

 

More warm­ing is like­ly

 

Eu­ro­pean and British cal­cu­la­tions fig­ure with a cool­ing La Ni­na in­stead of last year’s warm­ing El Ni­no, 2025 is like­ly to be not quite as hot as 2024. They pre­dict it will turn out to be the third-warmest. How­ev­er, the first six days of Jan­u­ary — de­spite frigid tem­per­a­tures in the U.S. East — av­er­aged slight­ly warmer and are the hottest start to a year yet, ac­cord­ing to Coper­ni­cus da­ta.

Sci­en­tists re­main split on whether glob­al warm­ing is ac­cel­er­at­ing.

There’s not enough da­ta to see an ac­cel­er­a­tion in at­mos­pher­ic warm­ing, but the heat con­tent of the oceans seem to be not just ris­ing but go­ing up at a faster rate, said Car­lo Buon­tem­po, Coper­ni­cus’ di­rec­tor.

“We are fac­ing a very new cli­mate and new chal­lenges — cli­mate chal­lenges that our so­ci­ety is not pre­pared for,” Buon­tem­po said.

This is all like watch­ing the end of “a dystopi­an sci-fi film,” said Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia cli­mate sci­en­tist Michael Mann. “We are now reap­ing what we’ve sown.”

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Sto­ry by SETH BOREN­STEIN | As­so­ci­at­ed Press


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