After November 2024 was the second warmest November in the books, experts say the year is “effectively certain” to break the heat record set by 2023
Eli Wizevich December 9, 2024 3:05 p.m.
Just one year after 2023 made the record books as the hottest year in Earth’s documented history, climate scientists are all but certain that 2024 will take its title.
According to a new report by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), a European research group that tracks global temperatures, November 2024 was the second warmest November on record, after November 2023. Both beat out historical temperature averages for the month by large margins. November 2024 was 0.73 degrees Celsius warmer than the average global November air temperature from 1991 to 2020, and it was 1.62 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial November average for 1850 to 1900.
“With just one month of the year left, it is effectively certain that 2024 will be warmer than 2023, and thus the warmest calendar year on record,” C3S reports.
Keeping global temperatures less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, as the Paris Agreement stipulates, now seems increasingly unlikely. With November in the rearview, 2024 is on track to be the first year to exceed that 1.5 degrees Celsius limit after 2023 fell short of the marker by just 0.02 degrees.
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Last year’s record-melting temperatures were in part due to an El Niño event—a natural occurrence that saw a buildup of warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, exacerbating extreme weather and raising temperatures globally. El Niño ended in May 2024, and some scientists suspected La Niña, the converse climate pattern in which colder water builds up in the same part of the Pacific, would soon begin. But despite some predictions that it might occur in late summer or fall, the cooling pattern has so far failed to materialize.
These phenomena left researchers “a little perplexed,” Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, tells Tammy Webber of the Associated Press (AP).
Heat released from the warmer ocean waters associated with El Niño might prevent “the cooling effect that often, in decades gone by, helps bring the temperature back down,” Overpeck suggests to the publication. He adds that the rate of warming seen this year, so closely following last year’s increase, is “a scary thing.”
C3S reported earlier this year that summer 2024 was the hottest on record globally. And in the United States alone, November 2024 clocked in as the nation’s sixth warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For Alabama, Louisiana, Maine and Mississipi, it was the warmest documented November in history.
This excess heat raises the risk of other types of extreme weather. Swiss Re, an insurance firm that researches the effects of climate disasters, estimates that economic damage related to climate change in 2024 was $320 billion—25 percent higher than the average over the past decade, per the Guardian’s Damian Carrington.
“Losses are likely to increase as climate change intensifies extreme weather events,” the firm tells the Guardian.
The evidence of this damage was abundant worldwide. This year, hurricanes battered coastlines, destroying whole neighborhoods and leaving scientists to wonder if a new Category 6 might be necessary to describe the nature of these supercharged storms. Forest fires spread into regions like the northeastern U.S., which rarely burned before. And floods in eastern Spain in October killed at least 224 people, leading the government to offer its citizens paid climate leave in case of extreme weather.
These new global temperature records are “terrible news for people and ecosystems,” as Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, who was not involved with the new assessment, tells the AP.
Even if temperatures fall in the new year with the possibility of a La Niña event, “this does not mean temperatures will be ‘safe’ or ‘normal,’” Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London, tells Reuters’ Kate Abnett and Alison Withers.
“We will still experience high temperatures, resulting in dangerous heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones,” Otto adds.
This grim record that 2024 will almost certainly set in its final few weeks offers another indication that this pattern of extreme heat and violent weather, as scientists say, is no longer the anomaly but the norm.
And, though one year above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshhold does not mean the world has breached the Paris Agreement, “it does mean ambitious climate action is more urgent than ever,” as Samantha Burgess, C3S deputy director, says in a statement.
