- The COP29 summit aims to increase funding to combat climate change.
- C3S director says climate change is fueling extreme weather.
- The world is expected to exceed the Paris Agreement target by 2030.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Thursday that this year is “almost certain” to overtake 2023 as the world’s warmest year since records began.
The data was released ahead of next week’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries will try to agree a significant increase in funding to tackle climate change. Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections dampened expectations for the talks.
C3S said that from January to October, the average global temperature was so high that 2024 was certain to be the world’s hottest year – unless anomalous temperatures in the rest of the year fell to near zero.
“The fundamental and fundamental reason for this year’s record is climate change,” said Carlo Bontempo, Director of C3S. Reuters.
He said, “The climate is getting warmer in general. It is a rise in temperatures on all continents and in all ocean basins. So we must see these records broken.”
Scientists said 2024 will also be the first year in which the planet will be 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was in the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the main cause of global warming.
Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at public research university ETH Zurich, said she was not surprised by the achievement, and urged governments at COP29 to agree on stronger measures to wean their economies off carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels.
“The limits set in the Paris Agreement are beginning to collapse given the very slow pace of climate action around the world,” Seneviratne said.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, to avoid its worst consequences.
The world has not yet breached that target – which suggests an average global temperature of 1.5°C over decades – but C3S now expects the world to exceed the Paris target by around 2030.
“It’s just around the corner now,” Bontempo said.
Every bit of temperature increase makes severe weather worse.
In October, catastrophic floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record-breaking forest fires swept through Peru, and floods in Bangladesh destroyed more than a million tons of rice, sending food prices soaring. In the United States, Hurricane Milton was also exacerbated by human-induced climate change.
C3S records go back to 1940, which are cross-checked with global temperature records dating back to 1850.