Rising Greenhouse Gas Emissions with El Nino behind Record Global Heat in 2024, Says UN's WMO

The rising greenhouse gas emissions along with the shift from a cooling La Niña to warming El Niño has been the key factors behind the record global temperatures in 2024, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in its latest report on Wednesday. In the last 800,000 years, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have touched the highest levels.

As per real time data from certain specific locations, levels of these three main greenhouse gases continued to rise in 2024. The United Nations’ specialised weather and climate agency WMO in its latest State of the Climate report, stated that global carbon dioxide concentrations reached 420 parts per million(ppm) in 2023.

It is estimated that long-term global warming is currently between 1.34 and 1.41 °C, as compared to the 1850-1900 baseline, the report further noted. In addition to El Nino and the rising greenhouse gas emissions, several other factors like changes in solar cycle, massive volcanic eruption as well as decrease in cooling aerosols has contributed to the unusual temperature rise at a global level.

The report also noted that apart from 2024 setting a new record in terms of global temperature rise, the years between 2015 and 2024 has been the ten warmest ones on record. “Record levels of greenhouse gases were the primary driver, with the shift to El Niño playing a lesser role,” it stated. El Nino refers to a periodic warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that occurs every two to seven years and usually lasts for nine to 12 months.

"The more we emit, the hotter it gets and every fraction of a degree of global warming accelerates the costs to the environment as well as human health and well-being," said Dr. Luke Parsons, Applied Climate Modeling Scientist at The Nature Conservancy. Adding on to the same, he added, “We urgently need to cut fossil fuel emissions as that will yield both immediate and long-term benefits and we will see improved air quality right away as well as limit the worst impacts of warming in the coming decades."

Furthermore, extreme events and their impacts also became a major contributing factor towards climatic effects and subsequent toll on humankind in the last year. As per the findings of the study, extreme weather events in 2024 led to the highest number of new annual displacements since 2008 and also disrupted homes, critical infrastructure, forests, farmland and biodiversity. Such drastic impacts have also led to worsening food crises in 18 countries globally by mid-2024.

Talking about the impact of such extreme weather events, climate activist Vanessa Nakate said, "With at least 151 ‘unprecedented’ extreme weather events in 2024 alone, we are seeing the devastating human cost of climate inaction. The longer we delay emission cuts, the worse it will get. Phasing out fossil fuels is now an emergency response to a crisis unfolding before our eyes."

In the beginning of this year, the WMO had said that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first with a global average temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.