Has the World Breached the 1.5°C Warming Limit in 2024?

In 2024, we are set to witness a significant turning point: the global temperature rise is projected to exceed the critical threshold of 1.5°C established by the Paris Agreement. This year is also expected to break records, becoming the hottest year ever recorded, surpassing the heat levels we experienced in 2023.

Carbon Brief’s State of the Climate analysed five research groups: NASA’s GISTEMP, NOAA’s GlobalTemp, Hadley/UEA’s HadCRUT5, Berkeley Earth, and Copernicus/ECMWF. All of them show that 2024 will be the first full to surpass 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels across these observational records.

The first nine months of 2024 have also reached global records in many regions, and this temperature rise closely reflects the climate model projections. The world’s sea ice extent is at record lows, with Antarctic Sea ice mostly at near-record lows this year, just behind 2023’s record.

Has the world breached the 1.5°C limit?

Exceeding 1.5°C in a single year is not equivalent to breaching the Paris Agreement limit. The goal is generally considered to refer to long-term warming – typically over two or three decades – rather than annual temperatures that include the short-term influence of natural fluctuations in the climate, such as El Niño, the report notes.

Read Carbon Brief’s State of the Climate report.

However, every year-long breach brings the world dangerously close to passing the 1.5°C threshold in the long term. The UN Environment Programme’s “Emissions Gap Report 2024”, released in October, reveals a stark finding.

The annual report shows that combining all the country’s climate pledges (Nationally Determined Contributions) puts the world on a 2.6-3.1°C temperature trajectory by 2100, which will have debilitating impacts on people, the planet, and economies.

Extreme weather events in 2024

Copernicus, Europe’s climate agency, shows that October 2024 was the second-warmest globally, after October 2023, with an average surface air temperature of 15.25°C. October 2024 was 1.65°C above pre-industrial level, marking the 15th month in 16 months with average temperatures above the 1.5°C threshold.

The month has seen catastrophic flash floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record wildfires tore through Peru, and flooding in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, sending food prices skyrocketing.

Other devastating weather events in 2024 include Hurricane Milton in the US, the deadly Hurricane Helene that hit several the US south-eastern states in September, wildfires in the Amazon that started at the beginning of 2024 and continued for eight months, burning 13.4 million acres by August 2024, an extreme monsoon downpour in India, and a heat wave during the Summer Olympics. Scientists have found that climate change made these extreme events more likely and damaging.

A new milestone for the earth’s temperature

The information that the world will surpass the 1.5°C threshold for the first time comes days before the world’s leaders and policymakers gather for the UN’s climate summit, COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29,” C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess said, days before countries gather for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

According to the United Nations, this year’s COP29 has been dubbed the “finance COP.” Finance will be a key focus of COP29, as trillions of dollars are required for countries to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect lives and livelihoods from the worsening impacts of climate change.

The challenge and success of this year’s COP will depend on getting countries to agree on a bigger target for climate finance – a mechanism by which rich countries provide funding to help poorer ones with their clean energy transition climate adaptation and bolster their climate resilience.

The conference will also be critical for countries to present their updated national climate action plans under the Paris Agreement, due by early 2025. If done right, these plans would limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and double as investment plans advancing the Sustainable Development Goals.