"International agencies coordinate release of annual climate data to highlight the past year’s “exceptional”—and dangerous—climate conditions."
"Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid.
And when last year is averaged with 2023, both years together also exceed that level of warming, which was noted as a red line marking dangerous climate change by 196 countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.
The temperature figures were seen as so significant that the new annual climate data for 2024 was presented Thursday night as part of the first-ever internationally coordinated release by several institutions that track global temperatures, in part to mark the “exceptional conditions experienced in 2024,” according to a report published today by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service."
Bob Berwyn reports for Inside Climate News January 9, 2025.
SEE ALSO:
"2024 Brought the World to a Dangerous Warming Threshold. Now What?" (New York Times)
"Earth Breaks Yearly Heat Record And Lurches Past Dangerous Warming Threshold" (Associated Press)
Advertisement 
