European Scientists Call 2024 To Be The Hotst Year In The World Once Recorded

Illustration of hot temperatures. (Wikimedia Commons/Chris Yarzab)

JAKARTA - The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Thursday said 2024 would "almost certainly" surpass 2023 as the hottest year in the world since records began.

The data was released ahead of the UN COP29 climate summit next week in Azerbaijan, where countries will try to agree on a major increase in funding to tackle climate change. Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election on Tuesday has reduced expectations of the talks.

C3S said, from January to October, the average global temperature was so high that 2024 would definitely be the hottest year in the world, except for the temperature anomaly in the rest of this year dropping to close to zero.

"The fundamental and fundamental cause of this year's record is climate change," C3S Director Carlo Buontho told Reuters.

"Iklims are generally heating up. Warming up occurs on all continents, in all ocean basins. So, we will definitely see those records broken," he said.

Scientists say 2024 will also be the first year the planet is over 1.5C hotter than the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas are the main causes of global warming.

Sonia Seneviratne, climate scientist at the public research university ETH Zurich said she was not surprised by the milestone, and urged the government at COP29 to approve stronger measures to stop their economy from fossil fuels producing CO2.

"The ranks set in the Paris agreement are starting to collapse given the delay in climate action around the world," explained Seneviratne.

Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming beyond 1.5C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), to avoid its worst consequences.

The world has not violated that target - which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5C for decades - but C3S now estimates the world will surpass Paris' target around 2030.

"It's basically close by now," Buontempo explained.

It is known, each fraction of temperature increases triggers extreme weather.

In October, a devastating flash flood killed hundreds of people in Spain, a forest fire that broke the record for hitting Peru and flooding in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, causing food prices to skyrocket. In the United States, Hurricane Milton has also been exacerbated by climate change caused by humans.

C3S records themselves began in 1940, which has been re-examined with global temperature records since 1850.