The Earth will notch its hottest year on record in 2024, breaking the previous peak set only last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday.
The new high temperature mark is the latest signal that human-driven climate change is worsening, and it comes as global sea ice cover fell to its second-lowest level, another harbinger of a warming planet.
Though the full-year data was not yet fully complete, NOAA said 2024 has a greater than 99 percent chance of beating last year’s mark, which had been the highest since record keeping began in 1850. Globally, temperatures were 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.28 degrees Celsius) above the 20th Century average from January through November. Every continent experienced its warmest year on record — except Asia, which recorded its second-warmest year.
NOAA’s findings are an ominous sign for global efforts to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 C since the Industrial Revolution, a goal set out in the Paris climate agreement. The agency’s observations come on the heels of forecasts from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service that indicated the world surpassed that temperature mark this year, though doing so for one year is less severe than remaining above it for a sustained, multi-decade climatic scale.
President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House next month, and he has vowed to roll back the climate policies enacted under President Joe Biden. He’s also pledged to again pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris agreement that has served as the basis for international action to address the rising temperatures that are fueling worsening droughts, heatwaves and wildfires and fueling more powerful storms.
Biden has made fighting climate a core priority for his administration, including speeding the deployment of clean energy and helping communities adapt to the effects of a warming planet. But many of his policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest-ever U.S. investment in fighting climate change, are expected to be targeted by Republicans, who will control the White House and both chambers of Congress next year.
Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Adm. Rachel Levine said the 2024 temperature record is a clear sign that nations are failing to arrest climate change, which is endangering people’s lives, jeopardizing food security and widening the footprint for tropical diseases.
“It is possible that actually, though, 2024 will be the coolest year that we ever see in our life,” she said at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington. “So when I tell that statistic or that potential, people notice because of the heat-related health impacts that we have seen in the United States and around the world.”
NOAA’s reported on Tuesday that the Arctic tundra has shifted from a carbon “sink” — which pull and store greenhouse gases from the atmosphere — to a greenhouse gas emitter because rapid warming, wildfires and thawing permafrost releasing trapped organic matter.
