Flooding in the Sahara, Amazon tributaries drying and warming tipping over 1.5°C — 2024 broke all the wrong records
Climate change is the most pressing problem humanity will face this century. Tracking how the climate is actually changing has never been more critical.
Today, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published its annual State of the Climate report, which found heat records kept being broken in 2024. It’s likely 2024 was the first year to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the Earth’s pre-industrial average temperature. In 2024, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit the highest point in the last 800,000 years.
The combination of heat and unchecked emissions, the organisation points out, had serious consequences. Attribution studies found a link between climate change and disasters such as Hurricane Helene, which left a trail of destruction in the southeastern United States and the unprecedented flooding in Africa’s arid Sahel region.
Slowing these increasingly dangerous changes to Earth’s climate will require a rapid shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.
The record heat of 2024
From the North Pole to the South Pole, the oceans and our land masses, the report catalogues alarm bells ringing ever louder for Earth’s vital signs.
Steadily rising global average temperatures show us the influence of the extra heat we are trapping by emitting greenhouse gases. The ten warmest years on record have all happened in the past ten years.
The report shows 2024 was the warmest year since comprehensive global records began 175 years ago. The planet was an estimated 1.55°C (plus or minus 0.13°C) warmer than it was between 1850 and 1900.
Together, 2023 and 2024 marked a jump in global mean temperature from previous years. There was a jump of about 0.15°C between the previous record year (2016 or 2020 depending on the dataset) and 2023. Last year was even warmer — about 0.1°C above 2023.
Last year was the first year the planet was likely more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This doesn’t mean we have broken the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of holding warming under 1.5°C — temperatures would need to be sustained over a number of years to formally lose that fight. But it’s not good news.
There are a few extra factors at play in this record-breaking global temperature, including an El Niño event boosting eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures in the first part of 2024, falling pollution from shipping leading to less cloud over the ocean and a more active sun as well.
Researchers are hard at work unpicking why the Earth’s average temperature jumped in 2023 and 2024. But it is clear the 2024 record-breaking warmth and most other damning statistics in the report would not have occurred if it wasn’t for human-induced climate change.