Copernicus: 2024 to be warmest year on record

The world is warming and almost everyone is feeling it. 2024 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday. The data was released ahead of the UN climate summit COP29 in Azerbaijan, where countries will try to agree a significant increase in climate finance. Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election has dampened expectations for those talks. The C3S said that from January to October, the global average temperature was so high that 2024 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record - unless the temperature anomaly for the rest of the year drops to near zero. "The fundamental cause of this year's record is climate change," C3S director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters. "The climate is warming in general. It's warming on all continents, in all ocean basins. So we are on the verge of breaking these records," he said. Scientists said 2024 would also be the first year the planet warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial period, 1850-1900, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the main cause of global warming. Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, said she was not surprised by the milestone, and urged governments at COP29 to agree on stronger action to wean their economies off CO2-emitting fossil fuels. "The limits that were set in the Paris Agreement are starting to collapse as the pace of climate action around the world is too slow," Seneviratne said. Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences. The world has not yet passed that threshold - which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius over decades - but C3S expects to surpass the Paris target around 2030. "It's basically a step away now," Buontempo said. "After 10 months of 2024, it is now almost certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the ERA5 data set," said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, quoted by the DPA agency. "This marks a new milestone in the global temperature record and should serve as a catalyst for increasing ambition for the upcoming COP29 climate change conference," Burgess added. ERA5 is the fifth generation of reanalyzed data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for global climate and weather over the past 8 decades, according to the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS).

Every fraction of a degree of temperature increase generates extreme weather events. In October, catastrophic floods killed hundreds in Spain, record fires devastated Peru, and floods in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, sending food prices soaring. In the United States, Hurricane Milton was also exacerbated by human-induced climate change, Reuters reports. The C3S records date back to 1940 and are compared with global temperature records dating back to 1850.