Never before have modern humans lived on a planet with such a high global temperature. He year 2024 has become the first to overcome on average the emblematic threshold of 1.5 degrees of warming over pre-industrial times, as confirmed by data published this Friday by the European agency Copernicus. A ‘planetary race’ that leads to the intensification of heat waves, torrential rains or rising sea levels, among other effects of climate change.
Behind these record records is the greenhouse gas concentration, at the highest levels ever recorded in the atmosphere, to which other factors have been added that have pushed temperatures to these unprecedented levels. Among them is El Niño, a natural phenomenon that occurred until mid-year and that raises ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, influencing the climate of the entire planet.
The agency estimates that 2024 temperatures have been 1.6°C above from pre-industrial records. This means that last year was the warmest recorded in a series of data that begins in 1850, and also that the psychological barrier of a degree and a half of warming over the levels of a century and a half ago, when the Human beings accelerated the burning of fossil fuels
Exceeding this climate threshold once does not mean breaking the limit of the Paris Agreement, with which the international community committed to keeping the planet as close to this limit and preventing the increase in temperatures from rising above 2 degrees, since 20 years of temperatures above 1.5º are needed to consider it transferred stably. But it does give a sample of where the planet is headed. «Global temperatures are increasingor beyond what modern humans have ever experienced.”says Copernicus. That is, they are conditions unprecedented in the last 100,000 years.
«Each year of the last decade is one of the ten warmest on record. We are now on the verge of exceeding the 1.5ºC level defined in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above this level,” says Samantha Burgess, head of the Copernicus climate monitoring programme. “These high global temperatures, along with record levels of atmospheric water vapor in 2024, they meant unprecedented heat waves and heavy rain events, causing misery for millions of people.
In fact, in Spain, this year some studies have linked the virulence of the Valencia dana rains with an increase in the surface temperature of the Mediterranean and global warming. World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists that has specialized in quickly studying whether or not a weather event is linked to climate change, has concluded that global warming doubled the probability that the damage would happen and contributed to the rains. were 12% more intense. A figure similar to that obtained by another study, this time from Climameter, a research project funded by the European Union and the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), which concluded that climate change increased precipitation by 15%.
warmest day
Globally, the monthly global average temperature exceeded 1.5° above pre-industrial levels for 11 months of the year. Going back further, every month since July 2023, except July 2024, has exceeded the 1.5° level. And during this year, the day with the highest temperature recorded so far was also reached: it was July 22, when there was an average of 17.16°.
«Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but the way we respond to the climate challenge must be based on evidence. The future is in our hands: quick and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate,” says Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
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