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The year 2024 is well on its way to become the hottest year since the preindustrial period, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
The year may also be the first year to cross the 1.5°C above the preindustrial annual average temperature, according to the C3S. The C3S concluded this after analysing the data for the first 10 months of 2024.
This would be the second year in a row when the global annual temperature record would be broken.
“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the C3S.
The WMO’s analysis of six different temperature datasets from January to September 2024 also found that the year may be the warmest on record.
“Today, the WMO and partners tell us that 2024 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded — almost two months before it ends,” said Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations in a WMO press statement. “Humanity’s torching the planet and paying the price,” he added.
WMO uses data from the observational sites and instruments on land and over the oceans from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautical and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies, The United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre, University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, the Berkeley Earth Group, C3S and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).
The last two datasets are reanalyses datasets which combine observational data with weather models to get a complete picture of temperature data even from places where there are no observational sites such as the polar regions and the oceans.
The month of October 2024 was 1.65°C above preindustrial levels and the 15th month out of the last 16 months when the monthly global average air temperature crossed1.5°C above preindustrial levels, according to C3S. This also made October 2024 the second warmest October since 1850-1900 period.
C3S had also indicated back in July that 2024 was on a pathway to break the annual temperature record. And there are many indicators of the trend.
“The global-average temperature for the past 12 months (November 2023- October 2024) was 0.74°C above the 1991-2020 average, and an estimated 1.62°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average,” said C3S in its statement.
“The average global temperature anomaly for the first 10 months of 2024 (January to October) is 0.71°C above the 1991-2020 average, which is the highest on record for this period and 0.16°C warmer than the same period in 2023,” C3S added.
The average temperature anomaly would have to drop to zero for the next couple of months for 2024 not to be the warmest year surpassing 2023. It is also likely that the average annual temperature may be above preindustrial levels by more than 1.55°C.
While crossing the 1.5°C mark in individual months or years does not imply that the Paris Agreement’s average global temperature threshold of 1.5°C has been exceeded, repeated crossings do bring the planet closer to that critical barrier.
The oceans also were much warmer-than-normal in October, similar to the atmospheric temperatures. The average sea surface temperatures for October 2024 for the tropical and sub tropical regions of the planet was 20.68°C, the second warmest since the preindustrial period and only 0.1°C below October 2023.
The warm atmosphere and warm oceans have lead to an increase in moisture levels in the atmosphere which can clearly be evidenced by the extreme weather events experienced around the world.
These included the catastrophic floods in Spain in late October and early November that have killed more than 200 people, Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico in the second week of October which showed explosive rapid intensification fuelled by ocean warming and devastated the US state of Florida and Cyclone Asna which unusually formed and intensified on land in its formative stages fuelled by soil moisture and brought huge torrents of rainfall to Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh states in India killing dozens.
According to the Clasius-Clapeyron equation, for every 1°C rise in global average temperature there would be seven per cent rise in atmospheric moisture levels. As the planet warms further, extreme weather events would only become much more intense, frequent and unpredictable.