Record heat pushed 2024 above 1.5°C global warming threshold

EARTH'S WARMING EXCEEDED 1.5 degrees Celsius on an annual basis for the first time in 2024, according to two major climate science agencies.

- ERIC ROSTON

It's the most potent evidence yet that countries are failing to meet a Paris Agreement goal of limiting global heating to that level as a decades-long average.

The amount of time left to avoid eclipsing the goal "is now wafer thin," said Colin Morice, a UK Met Office scientist.

Scientists sounded the alarm long before last year ended that 2024 would become the hottest year on record and almost certainly the first to surpass the 1.5C limit. Now both of those milestones have been confirmed in official statistical releases from two independent scientific agencies.

The EU's Copernicus Climate Service measured the 2024 global average temperature to be 1.6C above the pre-industrial average, and the UK Met Office to be 1.53C above it.

The clear acceleration in rising temperatures has puzzled scientists, even as the evidence of the fast-warming atmosphere became impossible to miss.

The hottest day ever recorded happened on July 21, 2024—a record that held until July 22. The planetary heatspike was made 2.5 times more likely by greenhouse gases, according to researchers. Typhoon Gaemi in Asia and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US, similarly juiced by climate change, killed hundreds of people and caused colossal damage.

There was flooding across Africa's Sahel and in southeastern Spain; drought in southern Italy and the Amazon river basin; wildfires in central Chile; and landslides in northern India.

Hottest-year status puts 2024 in rarefied company. The warmest year up to now, by a substantial margin? 2023. But while the heat is clear, scientists are struggling to account for the speed of this recent jump.