The European Union’s (EU) Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) stated that it is ‘virtually certain’ 2024 will surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record.
The data was released in a report by the agency on Thursday, November 7 ahead of the United Nations (UN) Conference of the Parties (COP29) climate summit scheduled to take place next week in Azerbaijan.
According to C3S, the global average temperature from January to October was so high that 2024 is guaranteed to be the warmest year, unless the temperature anomaly drops dramatically in the remaining months of the year.
Scientists have predicted that 2024 will mark the first year in which the Earth’s temperature exceeds 1.5 degree Celsius (⁰C) above the average for the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, a time when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
The primary driver of global warming is the carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas.
Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist who works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, expressed that she was not surprised by this milestone and called on governments at COP29 to take more decisive action to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels that emit CO2.
“The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world,” She said.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries committed to limiting global warming to no more than 1.5°C about 2.7 degree Fahrenheit (⁰F) to avoid its most severe impacts.
While the world has not yet exceeded this target, which refers to a long-term average global temperature increase of 1.5°C, C3S now predicts that the global temperature will surpass the Paris goal by around 2030.
Even small increases in temperature intensify extreme weather events.
Devastating flash floods in Spain which claimed hundreds of lives in the month of October, record-breaking wildfires that ravaged Peru and floods in Bangladesh that wiped out over 1 million tons of rice, causing food prices to soar are all effects of the rise in global warming in the year 2024.
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