The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Thursday said that this year is “virtually certain” to beat 2023 as the world’s warmest since records began.
This alarming data comes as nations prepare for the UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where discussions are set to focus on significantly increasing funding to combat climate change.
However, expectations for fruitful negotiations have been tempered by Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory in the United States presidential elections.
According to the C3S, from January to October, global temperatures reached unprecedented levels, making it virtually inevitable that 2024 will be the hottest year recorded unless temperatures see a drastic decline in the remaining months.
“The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change,” C3S Director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters.
“The climate is warming, generally. It’s warming in all continents, in all ocean basins. So we are bound to see those records being broken,” he said.
The scientists said 2024 will also be the first year in which the planet is more than 1.5°C hotter than in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, 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 public research university ETH Zurich, said she was not surprised by the milestone, and urged governments at COP29 to agree stronger action to wean their economies off CO2-emitting fossil fuels.
“The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world,” Seneviratne said.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5°C, to avoid its worst consequences.
The world has not breached that target — which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5°C over decades — but C3S now expects the world to exceed the Paris goal around 2030.
“It’s basically around the corner now,” Buontempo said.
Every fraction of temperature increase fuels extreme weather.
In October, catastrophic flash floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record wildfires tore through Peru, and flooding in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, sending food prices skyrocketing. In the US, Hurricane Milton was also worsened by human-caused climate change.
C3S’ records go back to 1940, which are cross-checked with global temperature records going back to 1850.
