Reacción a "2024 was the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels"

The quality of the report is excellent, as in previous years. C3S - the Copernicus Climate Change Service - has become a reference in monitoring the state of the global climate. Its relevance to European interests is immense. It is de facto the authority at the scientific level, and hopefully also at the policy level, on the extent of anthropogenic climate change, to which natural climate variability is superimposed. 

The report confirms what has been announced for some months: that 2024 was the warmest year on record and that for the first time the threshold of a global warming level of 1.5°C (relative to the period 1850-1900) has been exceeded on an annual average. This fact, which was already predicted earlier this year in the annual reports of the BSC and the World Meteorological Organization, puts the global climate system on a trajectory where the probability of exceeding the first threshold of the Paris Agreement, which is for long-term global warming of 1.5°C, is increasingly high. It is to be expected that the rate of warming will not continue at the same rate in the coming years. The new set of decadal predictions that will be available in February will inform us about the likelihood of this occurring.  

While the report places much emphasis on the warming in the global oceans, which is in part a continuation of the extraordinary levels reached in 2023, the warming over much of the continents is very striking. Given the interest in what is happening, the scientific community is working to identify the physical reasons, beyond the increased concentration of greenhouse gases, that have produced two years in a row of such high temperatures. 

The rate at which global temperatures will continue to rise is not yet known. For this we need the new decadal predictions and a detailed analysis of the factors (anthropogenic, volcanic, biogenic and mineral aerosol changes, ocean heat content, natural variability in the ocean, etc.), which are behind what has happened in 2023 and 2024. The BSC is working with C3S and other international institutions in both directions.