Essay by Eric Worrall

“… Individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit … means we need to fight even harder to get on track. …”

Press Release | WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level

WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level 

• The past ten years 2015-2024 are the ten warmest years on record
• We have likely seen the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average
• Six international datasets are used to reach the consolidated WMO global figure
• 2024 saw exceptional land and sea surface temperatures and ocean heat
• Long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement not yet dead but in grave danger

Geneva (WMO – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that 2024 is the warmest year on record, based on six international datasets. The past ten years have all been in the Top Ten, in an extraordinary streak of record-breaking temperatures.

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“Today’s assessment from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) proves yet again – global heating is a cold, hard fact,” said UN Secretary-General Antóno Guterres.

“Individual years pushing past the 1.5 degree limit do not mean the long-term goal is shot. It means we need to fight even harder to get on track. Blazing temperatures in 2024 require trail-blazing climate action in 2025,” he said. “There’s still time to avoid the worst of climate catastrophe. But leaders must act – now,” he said.

The WMO provides a temperature assessment based on multiple sources of data to support international climate monitoring and to provide authoritative information for the UN Climate Change negotiating process. The datasets are from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Japan Meteorological Agency, NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the UK’s Met Office in collaboration with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (HadCRUT), and Berkeley Earth.

“Climate history is playing out before our eyes. We’ve had not just one or two record-breaking years, but a full ten-year series. This has been accompanied by devastating and extreme weather, rising sea levels and melting ice, all powered by record-breaking greenhouse gas levels due to human activities,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

“It is important to emphasize that a single year of more than 1.5°C for a year does NOT mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades rather than an individual year. However, it is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5°C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases the impacts on our lives, economies and our planet,” said Celeste Saulo.

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Read more: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2025/01/press-release-wmo-confirms-2024-as-warmest-year-on-record-at-about-1-55c-above-pre-industrial-level/

Anyone feel the apocalypse?

Scientists claiming their settled science models didn’t see it coming is also funny.

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

Gavin Schmidt

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

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Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z

2023-24 appears to have totally messed up the planned climate narrative. The UN and climate scientists looked all set to milk each fractional advance on 1.5C, then suddenly we blow past it and they have nothing to talk about. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets failed to slide into the sea, the North Pole Ice Cap is still there, and you can still buy food in the supermarket.

There are feeble attempts to bring forward the 2.0C fear narrative, but they don’t seem to be gaining much traction. After the Covid lockdown debacle, suddenly discovering 1.5C hype was just as fake as Covid lockdown narratives appears to have killed much of the remaining credibility of climate alarmists.

2025 is going to be a very good year for climate skeptics.

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