CHICAGO — For the second year in a row, the Earth will certainly be the hottest it has ever been. And for the first time, global warming this year reached more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the pre-industrial average, the European climate agency Copernicus said Thursday.

“It’s the relentless nature of warming that I think is worrying,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.

Buontempo said the data clearly shows the planet would not experience such a long streak of record temperatures without the steady increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driving global warming.

He cited other factors which contribute to exceptionally warm years like last year and this one. These include El Nino – the temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes the climate globally – as well as volcanic eruptions that release water vapor into the air and variations in temperature. ‘solar energy. But he and other scientists say long-term increases in temperatures beyond fluctuations like El Niño are a bad sign.

“A very strong El Nino is a preview of what the new normal will be in about a decade,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth.

News of a likely second year of record heat comes a day after Republican Donald Trump, who called climate change a “hoax” and promised to boost oil drilling and production, was re-elected to the presidency. It also comes days before the next United Nations climate conference, called COP29, begins in Azerbaijan. Discussions are expected to focus on how to generate billions of dollars to help the global transition to clean energy like wind and solar, and thus avoid continued warming.

Buontempo pointed out that exceeding the warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) for a single year is different from the goal adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. That goal aimed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times on average, over 20 or 30 years.

A United Nations report released this year says that since the mid-1800s, on average, the world has already warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit), up from previous estimates of 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) or 1.2 degrees (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit). ). This is concerning because the UN says the world’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets are still not ambitious enough to keep the 1.5 degree Celsius target on track.

The goal was chosen to try to avoid the worst effects of climate change on humanity, including extreme weather. “The heat waves, storm damage and droughts we are currently experiencing are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Natalie Mahowald, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University. Cornell.

Exceeding that figure in 2024 doesn’t mean the general trend of global warming has been exceeded, but “in the absence of concerted action, it will soon be the case,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University, put it in starker terms. “I think we missed the window by 1.5 degrees,” said Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that track countries’ carbon dioxide emissions. “There is too much warming.”

Indiana state climatologist Beth Hall said she was not surprised by the latest Copernicus report, but stressed that people should remember that climate is a global issue beyond their local experiences with climate change. “We tend to be siloed in our own world,” she said. Reports like this “take into account many, many places that are not in our backyard.”

Buontempo stressed the importance of global observations, strengthened by international cooperation, which allow scientists to have confidence in the conclusions of the new report: Copernicus obtains its results from billions of measurements made by satellites, ships, planes and weather stations around the world.

He said surpassing the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) mark this year is “psychologically important” as nations make decisions internally and approach negotiations at the annual UN summit on the changes. climate, from November 11 to 22 in Azerbaijan.

“The decision, clearly, is ours. It’s about each of us. And this is the decision of our society and our policy makers that follows,” he said. “But I think these decisions are better made if they are based on evidence and facts.”

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Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report. ___

Follow Melina Walling on X, formerly Twitter: @MelinaWalling.

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