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November 2024: the second warmest month ever, 2024 will be the hottest year on record

Copernicus confirms that the year will end with record temperatures, highlighting the growing urgency to act against climate change

November 2024 ranked as the second warmest month ever globally, after November 2023, confirming that 2024 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record. This is according to the monthly bulletin of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union-funded climate monitoring programme.

According to the bulletin, the global average surface air temperature was 14.10°C, or 0.73°C above the average for November over the 1991-2020 period, and a full 1.62°C above pre-industrial levels. This is the sixteenth month in the last seventeen in which global temperatures have exceeded the critical 1.5°C threshold compared to the pre-industrial era.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, said: ‘With the data collected through November, we can confirm with near certainty that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first entirely above 1.5°C of warming. This does not imply a breach of the Paris Agreement, but underlines the urgency of ambitious climate action.’

Warming has not only been limited to land. The mean sea surface temperature (Sst) for November 2024 reached 20.58°C, the second highest value ever for the month, only 0.13°C lower than the record set in November 2023. For the boreal autumn (September-November), the global mean temperature was the second highest ever recorded, at 0.75°C above the 1991-2020 average.

In Europe, November 2024 recorded an average temperature of 5.14°C, 0.78°C above the 1991-2020 average. However, this figure is not enough to place the month among the ten hottest Novembers ever recorded on the continent.

Overall, the global temperature anomaly for January-November 2024 stands at 0.72°C above the 1991-2020 average, exceeding the figure for the same period in 2023 by 0.14°C, making 2024 the hottest ever.

These data confirm the dramatic acceleration of global warming and the growing need to intensify climate change mitigation policies to avoid irreversible consequences for the planet.

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