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2024 was the hottest year on record and the first to top 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. All 10 of the hottest years have been in the last decade
It’s official: 2024 is the hottest year on record—and the first to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures. It’s another milestone that underscores how far the present climate has shifted from that of the past because of the continued burning of fossil fuels.
"All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), in a news release.
Last year, which C3S measured at 1.6 degrees C (2.9 degrees F) above preindustrial temperatures, surpassed the record that was just set in 2023. That year had set the record by a wide margin in global temperature terms, registering 0.17 degree C (0.31 degree F) above the previous record holder, 2016, according to C3S. All of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the past decade, according to C3S data.
Under the Paris climate accord, countries agreed to try to limit warming to under 1.5 degrees C and “well under” two degrees C (3.6 degrees F). That threshold hasn’t yet been breached; the accord considers the average over many years. But “we are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5°C level defined in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above this level,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, C3S’s parent organization, in the recent news release.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-T.S. Eliot
