2024 will be hottest year on record, warns EU monitor Copernicus

Days before nations gather in Azerbaijan for crunch UN climate talks, EU climate monitor Copernicus has warned that 2024 is "virtually certain" to be the hottest in recorded history.

With warming above 1.5C, the European agency said the world was passing a "new milestone" of temperature records. 

It warned that the findings should serve to accelerate action to cut planet-heating emissions at UN COP29 negotiations in Baku taking place from November 11-22.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said 2024 would probably be more than 1.55 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average -- the period before the industrial-scale burning of fossil fuels.

Technically, this rise does not amount to a breach of the 2015 Paris climate deal, which aims to limit global warming to below 2C and preferably 1.5C. That's because the limit is measured over decades and not individual years.

According to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Deputy Director Samantha Burgess: "It is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year of more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels."

She added: "This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29."

The UN climate negotiations will set the stage for a new round of crucial carbon-cutting targets and take place in the wake of climate change denier Donald Trump's U.S. election victory.

Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement during his first presidency. While his successor Joe Biden took the U.S. back in, Trump has threatened withdrawal again.

Average global temperatures have reached new peaks, as have concentrations of planet-heating gasses in the atmosphere.  

Scientists say the safer 1.5C limit is rapidly slipping out of reach, while stressing that every tenth of a degree of temperature rise heralds progressively more damaging impacts. 

Last month the UN said the current pace of climate action would result in a catastrophic 3.1C of warming this century, while all current climate pledges taken in full would still amount to a devastating 2.6C temperature rise.   

Global warming concerns just only rising temperatures, but the knock-on effect of all the extra heat in the atmosphere and seas.

Warmer air can hold more water vapor, while warmer oceans mean greater evaporation, resulting in more intense downpours and storms.

Marked by deadly flooding in Spain and Hurricane Milton in the United States, last month was the second hottest October on record, with average global temperatures second only to the same period in 2023. 

In a month of weather extremes, October saw above-average rainfall across swathes of Europe, as well as parts of China, the US, Brazil and Australia, Copernicus reported. 

The EU monitor also pointed out that the U.S. is also experiencing ongoing drought, affecting record numbers of people.

Copernicus said average sea surface temperatures in the area it monitors were the second highest on record for the month of October. 

C3S uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to aid its calculations.

Copernicus records date back to 1940 but other sources of climate data such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons allow scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much deeper in the past.

Climate scientists say the period being lived through right now is probably the warmest the earth has been for the last 100,000 years - at the start of the last Ice Age.