This year is “virtually certain” to eclipse 2023 as the world’s warmest since records began, likely averaging 1.55C to above pre-industrial levels, the EU earth observation agency said.
The record heat has primarily been fuelled by climate change, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said, turbo-charging dangerous weather like deadly flooding in Spain, ferocious hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US and record wildfires in Peru.
It would make 2024 the first year that temperatures averaged at 1.5C warmer than levels before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale.
It surpasses last year’s record of 1.48C above the global pre-industrial average. Figures like that 1.48C, smooth out extremes, which is why it might not have felt hot in every corner of the globe.
This year’s expected breach of that 1.5C goal, enshrined in the Paris climate agreement, is likely temporary rather than a permanent breach, and was also fuelled by the warming El Nino weather phenomenon.
But it is a sign of what’s to come, C3S warned.
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The data lands as analysts warn the re-election of Donald Trump could slow global efforts to tackle climate change, just as a critical 2030 deadline to slash emissions approaches.
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Mr Trump’s campaign team indicated he would pull the US out of the Paris Agreement again, dampening expectations for the UN COP29 climate summit starting in Baku next week.
Almost 200 countries will meet to thrash out the collective next steps towards tackling climate change, focusing on funding climate measures in developing nations, a concept Mr Trump has previously criticised.
Last year at COP28 in Dubai, countries agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels”, the number one cause of climate change.
But progress has been marginal, Sky News analysis has found, and Mr Trump has pledged to “drill, baby, drill” in the US, the world’s largest oil producer.
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“The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change,” C3S director Carlo Buontempo said.
“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.”
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the main cause of global warming.
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Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at public research university ETH Zurich, said she the milestone is not surprising, and urged governments at COP29 to speed up efforts to ditch planet-heating 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.
Mr Buontempo now expects the world to exceed the Paris goal permanently around 2030.
“It’s basically around the corner now,” he said.
