World temperatures go above 1.5 C warming limit for a full year, EU scientists say

The world just experienced its hottest January on record, but that wasn't the only new record it set, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday.

For the first time, the global temperature pushed past the internationally agreed upon warming threshold for an entire 12-month period, with February 2023 to January 2024, running 1.52 C, according to C3S.

Last month surpassed the previous warmest January, which occurred in 2020, in C3S's records going back to 1950.

Every month since June has been the world's hottest on record, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, said C3S director Carlo Buonotempo.

"Now it is the eighth month in a row that we have months that we have never seen so warm in history."

What does this mean for the Paris Agreement limit?

Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5 C, to avoid it unleashing more severe and irreversible consequences.

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Prof. Liz Bentley of the Royal Meteorological Society says the latest report from the Copernicus Climate Change Service is a warning that more extreme weather events lie ahead that could lead to 'catastrophic change ... that's irreversible' if the world doesn't do anything in response.

Despite exceeding 1.5 C in a 12-month period, the world has not yet breached the Paris Agreement target, which refers to an average global temperature over decades.

"It's not over yet," Buonotempo said, "and we don't expect to reach that point for another decade really. But every day, every month that we approach that date, it will gradually become more likely for days, weeks, months, or years, as in this case, to be above 1.5."

Some scientists have said the goal can no longer realistically be met, but have urged governments to act faster to cut CO2 emissions to limit overshooting the target — and the deadly heat, drought and rising seas that this would inflict on people and ecosystems — as much as possible.

"These are much more than numbers, ranks and records — they translate to real impacts on our farms, families and communities from unprecedented heat, changing growing seasons and rising sea levels," North Carolina State Climatologist Kathie Dello told the Associated Press.

Can we blame El Niño?

The exceptional January came after 2023 ranked as the planet's hottest year in global records going back to 1850. 

The El Niño weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, did push temperatures higher. But Buonotempo said it wasn't the primary driver of the record temperatures: "The only way of explaining what we have seen — these absolute extremes that we have seen — is to factor in the human-induced warming of the climate system."

El Niño hasn't been the only part of the surface that has been unusually hot, he said.

"We're well above average over Eastern Canada," he said, noting that this has been the case for months. In fact, he added, one thing remarkable about 2023 was the extra heat in North America and Europe.

"These regions have really contributed much more than in other cases to the extreme temperatures that we recorded over the last few months."

Hopes that El Niño effect could weaken

U.S. scientists have said 2024 has a one-in-three chance of being even hotter than last year, and a 99 per cent chance of ranking in the top five warmest years. The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre recently calculated that 2024 was "likely" to be warmer than 2023.

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The year 2023 was 1.48 C warmer than the pre-industrial average from 1850-1900, beating out 2016's record of 1.25 C, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Buonotempo said "that's not entirely surprising" and typically the year after El Niño is hotter than the year it arises.

He added that in general, we can expect the temperature to keep going up.

"It doesn't mean that every single year would be warmer than what we have lived through because it was so warm, but in on average the next five years, the temperature of the next five years is very likely, if not certain, to be higher than the average temperature of the last five years."

The El Niño phenomenon began to weaken last month, and scientists have indicated it could shift to the cooler La Niña counterpart later this year. Still, average global sea surface temperatures last month were the highest for any January on record.

While it was record hot in January, the level above normal was lower than the previous six months, according to Copernicus data.