- The COP29 summit aims to increase financing for climate change.
- Climate change is fueling extreme weather, says C3S director.
- The world is expected to surpass the Paris Agreement target by 2030.
This year is “virtually certain” to eclipse 2023 as the world's warmest since records began, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday.
The data was released ahead of next week's UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries will try to agree a huge increase in funding to tackle climate change. Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election has cooled expectations about the talks.
C3S said that from January to October, the average global temperature had been so high that 2024 would surely be the world's hottest year, unless the temperature anomaly in the rest of the year fell to near zero.
“The fundamental and underlying cause of this year's record is climate change,” said C3S director Carlo Buontempo. Reuters.
“The climate is warming across the board. It's warming on every continent, every ocean basin. So we're bound to see those records broken,” he said.
Scientists said 2024 will also be the first year the planet will be more than 1.5°C warmer than in the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of 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 milestone and urged governments at COP29 to agree on stronger action to wean their economies off dependence on CO2-emitting fossil fuels.
“The limits set in the Paris agreement are beginning to crumble given the too 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°C, to avoid its worst consequences.
The world has not surpassed that target (which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5°C over decades), but C3S now expects the world to surpass the Paris target around 2030.
“It's basically right around the corner,” Buontempo said.
Every fraction of the temperature rise fuels extreme weather.
In October, catastrophic flash floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record wildfires devastated Peru, and floods in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, sending food prices soaring. In the United States, Hurricane Milton was also exacerbated by human-caused climate change.
C3S records date back to 1940, and are cross-referenced with global temperature records dating back to 1850.
