() – New data confirms that 2024 will be the hottest year on record and the first calendar year to exceed the threshold of the Paris Agreement, devastating news for the planet that comes as the United States elects a president who has promised to undo its climate progress both at the global level. local and international.
Almost every country in the world pledged to strive to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius in the Paris Agreement, which scientists say would prevent cascading and worsening impacts such as droughts, heat waves and a catastrophic rise in sea level. They warn that at that level, the man-made climate crisis, fueled by heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution, begins to exceed the capacity of humans and the natural world to adapt.
Data released Wednesday by Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows that 2024 is “virtually certain” to exceed that threshold.
President-elect Donald Trump, a known climate denier, withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement during his first term and has vowed to do so again in his second. But the new data makes clear that further delays in climate action by the world’s major economies will ensure even higher levels of warming, and with it, worsening impacts.
“We don’t have time to stop,” Alex Scott, climate diplomacy strategist at the international think tank ECCO, said Wednesday.
As extreme weather fueled by climate change is killing more people and costing economies billions of dollars each year, the climate crisis has been prioritized in major international forums such as the G7 and G20.
“These are things that a Trump administration will not be able to escape,” Scott said. Not only did President-elect Trump promise to withdraw the US from the historic Paris climate agreement during the campaign, but some former Trump officials have floated the idea of withdrawing the country entirely from the United Nations treaty to address climate change. Doing so would end US participation in international negotiations and make it difficult for future administrations to re-enter them.
It would be a more “serious” and “dramatic” step, said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate think tank E3G and a longtime international climate expert.
Trump’s re-election will likely cast a shadow over COP29, the United Nations-backed international climate talks that begin Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan. The summit focuses on increasing financing to address the climate crisis.
Global climate negotiations face another moment of sharp change as Americans swing between presidential extremes, Meyer said.
“USA. has done this before and the world has gotten a little tired of this routine,” Meyer said. “On the other hand, the US is an important player in the scene, and I think other countries would want to maintain the ability to try to re-engage it in the future.”
Meyer and other experts said major emitting countries like China and the European Union will have to step up in the absence of U.S. climate leadership on the world stage, but added there are concerns that other nations will use Trump’s anti-climate stance. as an excuse to weaken their own climate ambitions.
Meanwhile, global temperatures are rising. Last month was the second warmest October, according to Copernicus, and was 1.65 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, when humans began generating fossil fuel pollution.
Extreme weather hit in many places during the month, including Hurricane Milton that hit Florida and devastating flash floods in Spain that killed more than 200 people. Another alarming weather milestone during the month included a lack of snow atop Mount Fuji in Japan for the first time in 130 years of records.
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