The Earth has suffered 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5C hotter than the average recorded before the fossil fuel era, new data from the European Union shows.
Temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record, scientists found, creating a year-long stretch in which the world was 1.64C hotter than in pre-industrial times.
The findings do not mean leaders have already failed to stop the planet heating 1.5C by the end of the century – a target that is measured in decade averages rather than single years – but that scorching heat will have exposed more people to violent weather.
Whether pumped out the chimney of a coal-burning power plant or ejected from the exhaust pipe of an aircraft, each carbon molecule clogging the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat. The hotter the planet gets, the less people and ecosystems can adapt.
Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which analysed the data, said the results were a ‘large and continuing shift’ in the climate.
‘Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,’ he said.
‘This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.’
Copernicus, a scientific organisation that belongs to the EU’s space programme, uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to track key climate metrics.
It found June 2024 was hotter than any other June on record and was the 12th month in a row with temperatures 1.5C greater than their average between 1850 and 1900.
Soaring Temperatures
The scientists said that whether pumped out the chimney of a coal-burning power plant or ejected from the exhaust pipe of an aircraft, each carbon molecule clogging the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat. The hotter the planet gets, the less people and ecosystems can adapt.
‘This is not good news at all,’ said Aditi Mukherji, a director at the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR) and co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
‘We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming – and at 1.5C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year.’
In its latest review of the science, the IPCC found that 1.5C of warming will kill off 70-90 per cent of tropical coral reefs, while warming of 2C will wipe them out almost entirely.
Mukherji compared 1C of global heating to a mild fever and 1.5C a medium-to-high grade fever.
She said: ‘Now imagine a human body with [that] temperature for years. Will that person function normally any more? That’s currently our Earth system. It is a crisis.’
