The world suffered an increase in its average temperature of more than 1.5° C in the last two years, the symbolic limit established by the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, a situation that requires “drastic climate action” according to the UN.
The year 2024 was the warmest year ever recorded since statistics began in 1850, as had been expected for months, confirmed the European climate observatory Copernicus, data later confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
“Unknown temperatures in 2024 require drastic climate action in 2025,” reacted UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
“There is still time to avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe,” Guterres said, but leaders must “act now.”
The new year does not seem like it will break those records again, but the British Meteorological Office warned that the year 2025 could be one of the three warmest recorded on the planet.
The data was also confirmed in the United States by its agency for oceans and the atmosphere (NOAA).
In 2025 the climate skeptic returns to power donald trumpand in parallel, countries must also announce their new climate commitments, updated every five years within the framework of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
However, greenhouse gas reduction efforts are slowing in some rich countries: just -0.2% in the United States last year, according to an independent report.
According to Copernicusin 2024 but also in the average of the two years 2023-2024, 1.5° C of warming was exceeded compared to the pre-industrial era.
This does not mean, however, that the most ambitious limit of the Paris agreement, which is understood to last at least 20 years, has been definitively crossed, Copernicus reminds.
But current climate warming is unprecedented in at least 120,000 years.
It is a “severe warning,” explained Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute, which researches the impact of climate change.
“We are experiencing the first impacts of a world at +1.5º C,” he said.
The devastating fires in the Los Angeles region, which have caused at least ten deaths and thousands of burned houses, coincided with these alarmist forecasts.
“Warning”
Other disasters exacerbated by climate change have emerged in recent months: 1,300 deaths in June during extreme heat waves during the pilgrimage to Mecca, historic floods in Africa and Spain, violent hurricanes in the United States and the Caribbean…
In economic terms, the natural disasters They caused $320 billion in losses worldwide, according to reinsurer Munich Re.
Containing warming to 1.5° C instead of 2° C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement, would significantly limit its most catastrophic consequences, according to the IPCC, the UN climate panel.
“Every year of the last decade is one of the ten warmest ever recorded,” warns Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
The oceans, which absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by humanity, have also continued to overheat, also reaching a record last year.
The annual average of its surface temperatures, excluding the polar zones, reached the unprecedented level of 20.87° C, breaking the 2023 record.
“In our hands”
In addition to the immediate impacts of marine heat waves on corals or fish, this long-lasting overheating of the oceans, the main regulator of the Earth’s climate, affects marine and atmospheric currents.
Warmer seas release more water vapor into the atmosphere, providing additional energy to typhoons, hurricanes or storms.
Therefore, Copernicus notes that the level of water vapor in the atmosphere also reached a record level in 2024, standing approximately 5% above the 1991-2020 average.
Last year the world experienced the end of the natural phenomenon El Niñowhich induces global warming and an increase in certain extreme events, and a transition towards neutral conditions or the reverse phenomenon, The Girl.
The WMO already warned in December that this would be “short and low intensity” and insufficient to offset the effects of climate change.
“The future is in our hands: rapid and decisive action can still divert the trajectory of our future climate,” underlines the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), Carlo Buontempo.
COP29 in Bakuthe last major UN climate conference, barely gave birth to a new target for climate finance in November and remained almost silent on greenhouse gas reduction ambitions and, in particular, the phase-out of fossil fuels .
