Climate change continues its deadly work, relentlessly. The summer of 2024 was the hottest ever measured on the planet. From June to August, the northern hemisphere recorded the highest global average temperature ever measured, already beating the record of 2023, announced the European Copernicus Observatory.
In 2024, the planet experienced the hottest June and August ever recorded, and the hottest day. “This series of records increases the probability that 2024 will be the hottest year ever recorded,” also ahead of 2023, warns Samantha Burgess, deputy head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), in her monthly bulletin.
Greenhouse gas emissions remain high
Countries including Spain, Japan, Australia (in winter) and China have announced this week that they have measured historic levels of heat for the month of August. The “extreme events observed this summer will only intensify, with devastating consequences for people and the planet, unless we take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gases,” Burgess further warned.
Humanity, which emitted about 57.4 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022 according to the UN, has not yet started to reduce its carbon pollution. But China, the leading polluter ahead of the United States, is approaching its peak emissions, building twice as much capacity in wind and solar as the rest of the world.
Climate change that kills
In the meantime, climate disasters are occurring one after another on every continent. At least 1,300 people died in the heatwave during the pilgrimage to Mecca in June. In the American West, fires raged after several heatwaves that dried out vegetation since June and caused the death of several people; Las Vegas experienced a record mercury of 48.9°C in July. In Morocco, a brutal heatwave killed 21 people in 24 hours at the end of July in the center of the country, which is in the grip of its sixth consecutive year of drought.
But full reports take time: a study published in mid-August revealed an estimate of 30,000 to 65,000 deaths in Europe, mainly among the elderly, due to the heat in 2023. In Asia, Typhoon Gaemi, which killed dozens of people in July and devastated regions in the Philippines and China, was exacerbated by global warming, confirmed a study published in August. In Niger, a desert Sahelian country greatly weakened by climate change, floods in July caused at least 53 deaths and 18,000 homeless people.
The threshold of +1.5°C beaten
August 2024 ended with a global average temperature of 16.82°C according to Copernicus, or 1.51°C warmer than the average pre-industrial climate (1850-1900), in other words above the 1.5°C threshold, the most ambitious objective of the 2015 Paris Agreement. This emblematic threshold has already been broken in thirteen of the last fourteen months, according to Copernicus, for whom the last twelve months have been on average 1.64°C warmer than in the pre-industrial era.
After 2023 and its anomaly of 1.48°C according to Copernicus, 2024 therefore has a strong chance of becoming the first calendar year to exceed the fateful threshold. However, such an anomaly would have to be observed on average over several decades to consider that the climate, currently warmed by around 1.2°C, has stabilised at +1.5°C.
The unknown El Niño
These incessant records are fueled by unprecedented overheating of the oceans (70% of the globe), which have absorbed 90% of the excess heat caused by human activity. The average temperature at the surface of the seas has thus remained at abnormal temperatures since May 2023. This effect of global warming was accentuated for a year by El Niño, and the end of this cyclical phenomenon over the Pacific a few months ago gave hope for a moderation of global temperatures.
But the phenomenon “El Niño was not one of the strongest,” notes Julien Nicolas, a scientist at C3S, for AFP, and La Niña, the reverse cycle synonymous with cooling, is still awaited. “Some models indicate a continuation of the current neutral conditions, while others indicate temperatures clearly lower than normal” in the tropical Pacific Ocean, “so it is still difficult to know what the end of the year has in store for us,” he added.
With AFP