European Scientists Call 2024 To Be The Hotst Year Ever Recorded

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

JAKARTA - European Union scientists on Monday announced that 2024 will be the hottest year in the world since records began, with very high temperatures expected to last at least until the first few months of 2025.

Data from the European Union's COPnicus Climate Change Service (C3S) comes two weeks after UN climate negotiations resulted in an agreement worth 300 billion US dollars to tackle climate change, a package that poor countries have criticized for not covering the soaring cost of climate-related disasters.

C3S said data from January to November had confirmed that 2024 would now certainly be the hottest year ever recorded, and the first in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial period 1850-1900.

The previous hottest year ever recorded was 2023. On average, in 2023 the earth's temperature of 1.48 degrees Celsius is warmer than the pre-industrial period of 1850-1000, when humans started burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It is known that extreme weather has hit the whole world in 2024, with severe droughts hitting Italy and South America, fatal floods in Nepal, Sudan and Europe, heat waves in Mexico, Mali and Saudi Arabia that killed thousands of people to the devastating cyclones in the US and the Philippines.

Scientific studies have confirmed the traces of human-induced climate change in all these disasters.

Last month he was ranked second as the hottest November ever recorded after November 2023.

"We are still in an area that is close to a record high for global temperatures, and that is likely to last at least the next few months", CorporateISH climate researcher Julien Nicolas told Reuters.

The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.

Indeed, the emission to net zero, as many governments have promised, will stop global warming so as not to get worse.

However, despite these environmentally friendly promises, global CO2 emissions will hit a record high this year.

In addition, scientists are also monitoring whether La Nina's weather pattern, which involves cooling the sea surface temperature, could form by 2025. It can temporarily cool global temperatures, although it will not stop the long-term emission-induced heating trend. The world is currently in a neutral condition, after El Nino - which is the opposite of La Nina - ended earlier this year.

"Although 2025 may be slightly cooler than in 2024, in the event of La Nina, this does not mean the temperature will be 'safe' or 'normal'," said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at Imperial College London.

"We will still experience high temperatures, which result in dangerous heat waves, droughts, forest fires and tropical cyclones," he explained.

It is known, C3S records began in 1940, and were re-examined with global temperature records since 1850.