2024 Was the Hottest Year on Record: What Other Climate Records Did It Break?

2024 was the hottest year in history: what other climate records did it break? Dmitry Usik

Officially, 2024 became the hottest year on record. It broke the previous record, which was only set in 2023.

According to the European climate monitoring agency Copernicus, these changes have pushed the world to a critical climate threshold, Channel 24 reports, citing CNN.

What is known about the next hottest year and why it is dangerous

For example, 2024 was 1.6 degrees hotter than the period before humans began burning large amounts of fossil fuels. This makes last year the first calendar year to violate the 1.5 degree limit that countries agreed to avoid under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

A Copernicus analysis points to a number of climate records recorded last year. In July, the planet experienced its hottest day ever, every month from January to June was the warmest on record, and pollution levels on the planet reached unprecedented levels.

Last year continued the trend of abnormal heat. Each of the world's 10 hottest years has occurred in the last decade.

Every fraction of an extra degree brings increasing harm to people and ecosystems, said Jori Rogelj, a climate professor at Imperial College London.

The extreme weather that has swept the globe in the past year shows how dangerous life is in a warm world. The United States has been engulfed in constant hurricanes, while Europe has been hit by floods. Typhoons in the Philippines are no less dangerous. Amazon rivers have fallen to unprecedented lows during the region's worst drought on record.