2024 will officially be the hottest year on record, climatologists say. The average global temperature has exceeded the critical threshold of +1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels, indicating the increasing impact of climate change on the planet.
European Union scientists predict that 2024 will be the hottest year on record. The extremely high temperatures are expected to continue into the first months of 2025, Reuters reports.
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service said that 2024 is likely to be the hottest year on record and the first year in which the average global temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900.
The previous hottest year on record was 2023.
Recall that this year, extreme weather swept across the world: severe drought hit Italy and South America, deadly floods in Nepal, Sudan and Europe, heat waves in Mexico, Mali and Saudi Arabia that claimed the lives of thousands of people, and devastating cyclones in the US and the Philippines.
According to scientists' forecasts, 2025 could be slightly cooler than the current year if La Niña develops.
“But that doesn’t mean temperatures will be ‘safe.’ We will still face high temperatures leading to dangerous heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London.
Abnormal heat in Ukraine
This year, the meteorological summer in Ukraine turned out to be especially long – it began in mid-May and lasted until the first decade of October. According to Vira Balabukh, head of the department of applied meteorology and climatology of the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, such long and hot summers will soon become the norm for our country.
The expert notes that the duration of the hot period will increase: summer will start earlier and end later.
She calls the main reason for such changes the strengthening of the greenhouse effect, which leads to an overall increase in temperature on the planet.
Another factor she called the increase in solar activity, which reached its peak in October, also affected the increase in air temperature.
