Last year was the planet’s hottest in recorded history, multiple government agencies announced Friday, marking two years in a row that global temperatures have shattered records.
Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2024 was hotter than any year since at least 1880. Previously, 2023 was named the planet’s warmest year on record.
Last year’s average land and ocean surface temperatures topped the 2023 milestone by less than two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, according to NOAA.
The back-to-back broken records are part of a continued warming trajectory that climate scientists have long warned about and that was predicted in numerous climate models.
“Once again, the temperature record has been shattered — 2024 was the hottest year since record keeping began in 1880,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “Between record breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet.”
NASA scientists estimated that in 2024, Earth was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) hotter than the average from the mid-19th century — a period from 1850 to 1900.
While almost every corner of the planet was warmer-than-usual in 2024, there were some regional differences. North America, Europe, Africa and South America all had their warmest year on record in 2024, while Asia and the Arctic had their second-warmest year.
Still, the overall warming trend is clear. The planet’s 10 hottest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade, according to NOAA.
The new record comes as little surprise after a year beset by extremes. From June 2023 through August 2024, the planet notched 15 consecutive months of monthly temperature records, a trend NASA scientists called an “unprecedented heat streak.”
“The pattern of warming that you see is, in fact, very close to what models have predicted for many years, and we are now seeing very, very clearly,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said Friday in a news briefing
The hot streak in 2024 was boosted by El Niño, a natural climate pattern characterized by warmer-than-usual waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. El Niño typically compounds background warming from human-caused climate change, making temperature extremes both more likely and more intense.
“There were a number of truly notable extreme heat episodes last year,” said Russell Vose, chief of the monitoring and assessment branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
A brutal heat wave in Mexico in May and June, for instance, killed more than 100 people. And in Arizona, the city of Phoenix logged a record 113 straight days with triple-digit high temperatures last year. The previous record of 76 consecutive days was set in 1993.
“I used to live out there,” Vose said of Phoenix. “It was not like that 30 years ago.”
The consequences of such warming have been apparent: In recent years, climate change has intensified heat waves on every continent, deepened drought in already-parched parts of the world, strengthened storms and hurricanes and fueled deadly wildfires.
Even as the findings were announced on Friday, blazes were raging out of control in the greater Los Angeles area.
“This is no longer an esoteric, academic exercise for us,” Schmidt said of his research on global temperature trends. “This is now quite personal.”
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed the record Friday, announcing that according to its analysis, 2024 was the first full year in which global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial times.
Countries agreed in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above preindustrial times to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
NOAA and NASA scientists said that record-setting warmth may ease up in 2025 with the return of El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña. La Niña is characterized by a cooling of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which produces atmospheric reverberations that can strongly influence weather around the world.
Vose said preliminary calculations suggest there is only a 5% chance or less that 2025 will top 2024 as the hottest year on record. There is, however, a 95% chance that it will still rank in the top five, he said.
Still, there may be surprises in store.
“For the sake of full disclosure, at this time last year, we said there was only a 1-in-3 chance that 2024 would be the warmest year on record,” Vose said, “so it’s a tough game forecasting global temperature.”
