The year 2024 will end up as the warmest on record and it will be the first calendar year with temperatures being 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level,  the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has said. 

According to Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S: “With Copernicus data in from the penultimate month of the year, we can now confirm with virtual certainty that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first calendar year above 1.5°C. This does not mean that the Paris Agreement has been breached, but it does mean ambitious climate action is more urgent than ever.” 

0.14°C warmer than 2023

The year-to-date (January–November 2024) global average temperature anomaly was 0.72°C above the 1991-2020 average, the highest on record for this period, said C3S which is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission with funding from the EU. 

The January-November 2024 period was 0.14°C warmer than the same period in 2023.  C3S said November 2024 was the second-warmest November globally, after November 2023, with an average surface air temperature of 14.10°C, 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average for November.

November 2024 was 1.62°C above the pre-industrial level and was the 16th month in a 17-month period for which the global-average surface air temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.  

The average sea surface temperature (SST) for November 2024 over 60°S–60°N was 20.58°C, the second-highest value on record for the month, and only 0.13°C below November 2023.

‘Unusually high SSTs’

“The equatorial eastern and central Pacific had below-average temperatures, indicating a move towards neutral or La Niña conditions, but SSTs across the ocean remained unusually high over many regions,” said C3S.

In November 2024,  Arctic sea ice reached its third-lowest monthly extent at 9 per cent below average.  Antarctic sea ice extent reached its lowest monthly value at 10 per cent below average, slightly surpassing the values from 2016 and 2023. It was a continuation of a series of historically large negative anomalies observed throughout 2023 and 2024.

The global average temperature for boreal autumn (September to November) 2024 was the second highest on record at 0.75°C above the 1991-2020 average for the three months, 0.13°C cooler than the record set in September–November 2023.