By AFP -Agence France Presse
2024 'Virtually Certain' To Be Hottest Year On Record: EU Monitor
By Kelly MACNAMARA
It is “virtually certain” that this year will be the hottest on record, with warming above 1.5ºC, the European Union's climate monitor Copernicus said on Thursday, days before nations meet for UN climate talks.
The European agency said the world is passing a “new milestone” of temperature records, which should accelerate action to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases at the UN talks in Azerbaijan next week.
Last month, marked by deadly floods in Spain and Hurricane Milton in the United States, was the second warmest October on record, with average global temperatures second only to the same period in 2023.
Copernicus said that 2024 is likely to be more than 1.55 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average - the period before fossil fuels were burned on an industrial scale.
This does not represent a violation of the Paris Agreement, which strives to limit global warming to less than 2ºC and preferably 1.5ºC because it is measured in decades rather than individual years.
“It is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the hottest year ever recorded and the first year with more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels,” said the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), Samantha Burgess.
“This represents a new milestone in global temperature records and should catalyze increased ambition at the upcoming COP29 Climate Change Conference.”
The UN climate talks in Azerbaijan, which will set the stage for a new round of crucial carbon-cutting targets, will take place in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the US election.
Trump, a climate change denier, withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement during his first presidency, and although his successor, Joe Biden, took the US back, he has threatened to do so again.
Meanwhile, average global temperatures have reached new peaks, as have the concentrations of planet-warming gases in the atmosphere.
Scientists say that the safer limit of 1.5ºC is rapidly slipping out of reach while emphasizing that every tenth of a degree increase in temperature heralds progressively more damaging impacts.
Last month, the UN stated that the current pace of climate action would result in catastrophic warming of 3.1°C this century, while all current climate pledges, taken in full, would still represent a devastating 2.6°C rise in temperature.
Global warming doesn't just refer to rising temperatures but to the indirect effect of all the extra heat in the atmosphere and seas.
Warmer air can hold more water vapor, and warmer oceans mean more evaporation, resulting in more intense rain and storms.
In a month of weather extremes, October recorded above-average rainfall in areas of Europe, as well as parts of China, the USA, Brazil and Australia, Copernicus said.
The US is also experiencing an ongoing drought, which has affected a record number of people, the EU monitor added.
Copernicus said that average sea surface temperatures in the monitored area were the second highest ever recorded for October.
C3S uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft, and weather stations to aid its calculations.
The Copernicus records date back to 1940, but other sources of climate data, such as ice cores, tree rings, and coral skeletons, allow scientists to extend their conclusions using evidence from a much more remote past.
Climate scientists say that the period you are living through now is probably the warmest the Earth has experienced in the last 100,000 years, at the start of the last Ice Age.
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