GENEVA (AN) — The World Meteorological Organization confirmed the global average surface temperature in 2024 likely was 1.55° Celsius above pre-industrial levels – the warmest calendar year on record and first to exceed the major climate threshold set under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Signed by 195 countries, the United Nations-led legally binding treaty's main goal is to limit global warming to well below 2° C., with an aspiration to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° above the 1850-1900 average by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the main culprit for the warming.
"Today’s assessment from the World Meteorological Organization is clear: Global heating is a cold, hard fact," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said of the U.N. weather agency's announcement on Friday as wildfires tore through the Los Angeles area, killing 10 people and damaging or destroying 9,000 homes and other buildings.
"Individual years pushing past the 1.5° limit do not mean the long-term goal is shot. It means we need to fight even harder to get on track."
WMO noted its consolidated analysis of six datasets has a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13°, meaning the temperature breach is "likely" but not 100% certain. But each of the past 10 years are among the warmest ever, it added, creating an "extraordinary streak of record-breaking temperatures."
Not a 'long-term' failure yet
The six datasets come from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts; Japan Meteorological Agency; NASA; U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; U.K. Met Office and Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia; and Berkeley Earth.
Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service said one or two years of warming above the 1.5° limit doesn't mean the Paris treaty is definitively "breached," but with more than 0.2° of warming per decade the probability of that occurring within the 2030s is "highly likely."
"All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850," said Copernicus' director Carlo Buontempo. Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence."
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo agreed. “A single year of more than 1.5° for a year does not mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades rather than an individual year," she said. "However, it is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters."
