
EU weather monitor the Copernicus Climate Change Service has confirmed that with 2024 being the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023 and extending the streak of extraordinary heat that fueled climate extremes on all continents, we are drawing dangerously near the planet’s internationally agreed 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold.
The UK weather service predicts that 2025 will not be another record breaking year, but it will still rank among the top three warmest years in the history books.
The excess heat has supercharged extreme weather, and 2024 saw countries from Spain to Kenya, the United States and Nepal, hit by disasters that cost an estimated $300 billion. Los Angeles is currently battling deadly wildfires that have destroyed thousands of buildings and homes, forcing tens of thousands to flee.
Nearly 200 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 that meeting 1.5C offered the best chance of preventing the most catastrophic repercussions of climate change.
However, the world is nowhere on track to meeting that target. “We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5C level,” said Copernicus climate deputy director Samantha Burgess.
The 1.5C threshold is measured in decades, not individual years, but Copernicus said reaching this limit even briefly illustrates the unprecedented changes being brought about by humanity.
Scientists say every fraction of a degree above 1.5C is consequential, and that beyond a certain point the climate could shift in ways that are difficult to anticipate. At the present levels, human-driven climate change has already made droughts, storms, floods, and heat waves more frequent and intense.
It is easy to get into a defeatist mindset and think that we have passed the point of no return and tell ourselves that there is nothing that can be done. However, even faced with proof that the planet is heating up faster than we would like, and feeling the disastrous effects of a warming planet, humanity should refuse to lose this fight that can still be won, or at the very least end in a draw, if we all work together to achieve what scientists and climate activists have been telling us to do, which is reduce emissions in order to slow down global warming and climate change.
2025 is another year for us to try. Maybe this time, we can do better than last year. If we can do that, then we can try again, a little bit harder in 2026, and so on and so forth, until we make tangible gains and give future generations a fighting chance to live in a planet that is more livable than the one they would end up with if we continue to do nothing.*