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The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C, new data shows, despite world leaders vowing a decade ago they would try to avoid this.
The European Copernicus climate service, one of the main global data providers, said on Friday that 2024 was the first calendar year to pass the symbolic threshold, as well as the world’s hottest on record.
This does not mean the international 1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades, but does bring us nearer to doing so as fossil fuel emissions continue to heat the atmosphere.
Last week UN chief António Guterres described the recent run of temperature records as “climate breakdown”.
We must exit this road to ruin – and we have no time to lose, he said in his New Year message, calling for countries to slash emissions of planet-warming gases in 2025.
Global average temperatures for 2024 were around 1.6C above those of the pre-industrial period – the time before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels – according to Copernicus data.
The current trajectory would likely see the world pass 1.5C of long-term warming by the early 2030s. This would be politically significant, but it wouldn’t mean game over for climate action.
It’s not like 1.49C is fine, and 1.51C is the apocalypse – every tenth of a degree matters and climate impacts get progressively worse the more warming we have, explains Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth.
Even fractions of a degree of global warming can bring more frequent and intense extreme weather, such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall.
The question is whether this acceleration is something persistent linked to human activities that means we will have steeper warming in the future, or whether it is a part of natural variability, says Helge Gößling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute.
Despite this uncertainty, scientists stress that humans still have control over the future climate, and sharp reductions in emissions can lessen the consequences of warming.
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