Well, there you have it! The numbers are in! The award for the hottest year on record goes to… 2024! Beating previous award-winning 2023, it racked up an impressive 1.6 degrees hotter than the pre-industrial average. In fact, the world’s been on a record-breaking streak for some time now: the top ten hottest years occurred in, well, the last ten years.
But we won’t just look back on 2024 as yet another record-breaking year in a long run of unwelcome records. We’ll look back on it as the first year our world breached 1.5 degrees, the so-called ‘safe limit’ of heating.
Now, 2024’s heat is probably a spike caused by the Pacific El Nino weather pattern, and it may be a little cooler in 2025. But with carbon emissions still going up (the ones we’re supposed to be getting to zero!), it’s all but inevitable that 1.5 degrees will be the norm (yes, the norm) within ten years and 2 degrees by mid-century. And all but inevitable too are melting polar ice sheets and tundra, rising sea levels, release of methane, loss of almost all coral reefs and the species and livelihoods they support, as well as ever more intense storms and wildfires, drought and famine.
