2024, the warmest year on record

What was expected, according to forecasts, will be officially recorded. 2024 will be the warmest year on record, and extraordinarily high temperatures are expected to persist at least into the first months of 2025, European Union scientists said on Monday. The data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) comes two weeks after a UN climate summit ended with an agreement on $300 billion for climate adaptation, a financial package that low-income countries say is insufficient to cover the high costs of climate disasters. According to C3S, data for the period January - November confirmed that 2024 will certainly be the warmest year on record and the first when the average global temperature exceeds the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial period 1850-1900. The previous record for the warmest year was 2023. Extreme weather phenomena occurred all over the world in 2024: severe drought in Italy and South America, deadly floods in Nepal, Sudan and Europe, heat waves in Mexico, Mali and Saudi Arabia that killed thousands of people, disastrous cyclones in the United States or the Philippines. Scientific studies have confirmed the influence of climate change caused by human actions in all these disasters. Last month was the second warmest November on record after November 2023. "We are still in the territory of near-record high global temperatures and this will continue for the next few months," Copernicus climatologist Julien Nicolas told Reuters.

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change. Cutting emissions to net zero - as many governments have pledged to do - will prevent global warming from getting worse. Despite these environmental pledges, global CO2 emissions are set to hit a record high this year.

Researchers are also monitoring whether the La Nina climate pattern - which involves cooling ocean surface temperatures - could form in 2025. This could cool global temperatures, although it would not halt the long-term warming trend caused by emissions. Humanity is currently in climate neutral conditions after El Nino - the opposite of La Nina, a warming phenomenon - ended earlier this year. "Although 2025 could be slightly cooler than 2024 if a La Nina event develops, it does not mean that temperatures will be "safe' or "normal'," said Friederike Otto, a lecturer at Imperial College London. "We will continue to experience high temperatures, which will result in dangerous heat waves, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones."

The history of measurements made by CS3 dates back to 1940 and is compared with global temperature records since 1850.