Earth saw its hottest year in 2024, breached major climate threshold

Last year's global average temperature easily passed 2023's record heat and kept pushing even higher. It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Earth recorded its hottest year ever in 2024, with such a big jump that the planet temporarily passed a major climate threshold, several weather monitoring agencies announced Friday.

Last year’s global average temperature easily passed 2023’s record heat and kept pushing even higher. It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact, according to the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Service, the United Kingdom’s Meteorology Office and Japan’s weather agency.

The European team calculated 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.89 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. Japan found 1.57 degrees Celsius (2.83 degrees Fahrenheit) and the British 1.53 degrees Celsius (2.75 degrees Fahrenheit) in releases of data coordinated to early Friday morning European time.

American monitoring teams — NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the private Berkeley Earth — were to release their figures later Friday but all will likely show record heat for 2024, European scientists said. The six groups compensate for data gaps in observations that go back to 1850 — in different ways, which is why numbers vary slightly.

“The primary reason for these record temperatures is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” from the burning of coal, oil and gas, said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at Copernicus. “As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures continue to increase, including in the ocean, sea levels continue to rise, and glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt.”

Last year eclipsed 2023’s temperature in the European database by an eighth of a degree Celsius (more than a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit). That’s an unusually large jump; until the last couple of super-hot years, global temperature records were exceeded only by hundredths of a degree, scientists said.

The last 10 years are the 10 hottest on record and are likely the hottest in 125,000 years, Burgess said.

July 10 was the hottest day recorded by humans, with the globe averaging 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.89 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus found.