In 2024, the planet broke the record set in 2023 for the hottest year on record, NOAA, NASA, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service, Berkeley Earth, and the UKMET Office reported on January 10. There were 14 straight months of record-breaking global temperatures from June 2023 through July 2024, and the July global temperature value was likely the hottest of any month since 1850.
Human-caused climate change added an average of 41 days of dangerous heat globally in 2024, and it is likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change in 2024 is in the tens or hundreds of thousands, according to the World Weather Attribution group and Climate Central (see Bluesky post below).
According to Berkeley Earth, 24% of the Earth’s surface experienced a locally record-high annual average temperature in 2024. Local record annual averages impacted an estimated 3.3 billion people — 40% of the global population — with 104 countries setting new national records for their annual average, including China, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Greece, Malaysia, and South Korea.
Global ocean temperatures and land temperatures in 2024 were both the hottest on record, said NOAA. The record heat in the oceans in 2024 brought on a global coral bleaching event, the fourth one in recorded history (1998, 2010, 2014-17, and now 2024).
Global satellite-measured temperatures in 2024 for the lowest eight kilometers of the atmosphere were by far the hottest in the 46-year satellite record, according to the University of Alabama, Huntsville. The previous record was set in 2023.
First year with temperatures above 1.5°C above pre-industrial in most datasets
The year 2024 was the first in which global average surface temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the five leading datasets, with departures from average ranging between 1.46-1.62 degrees Celsius. (The differences in the datasets arise largely from using different baseline years for pre-industrial climate, such as 1850 versus 1880, and from slight differences in how researchers account for data-sparse areas such as the Arctic, especially prior to 1900.) While record heat in 2023 and 2024 was expected because of a strong El Niñ0 event that occurred in the Eastern Pacific, the full magnitude of the heat both years was higher than expected, for reasons that climate scientists are trying to understand.
Reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius in an individual year is not equivalent to a breach of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit – which refers to long-term warming over a period of 30 years – but it nevertheless indicates that the world is quickly approaching this internationally agreed threshold.
