Last year, 2024, was Earth’s hottest year since instrumental records began in the 1800s. This is the conclusion independently reached by all records sources – five US, UK, European and Japanese government agencies and one US university institute – which together inform the World Meteorological Organisation’s annual State of the Climate Report.
All those sources put the mean 2024 global surface temperature – the day-night, winter-summer average of both hemispheres – at or near 15C, 0.1C above the mean for the previous warmest year, 2023, and over 0.7C above the 1991-2020 average. To top it off, the 10 hottest years ever recorded are the past 10 years, 2015 to 2024.
The 2024 mean is well above the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C “safe” warming limit, making it the first calendar year to breach that mark. Projections indicate that this year won’t be quite as hot, but the past couple of years were a lesson in taking nothing for granted. Given the upward overall trend, the Paris mark is looking like old history.
Earth’s ancient climate archive, in sea and lake sediments, tells us about temperatures deep into the past. That proxy record says Earth is now close to the highest mean temperature at the peak of the last interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, when global sea level was 25 m higher than today.
It can’t be said too often that a hotter planet, driving a rising incidence of extreme weather events, is due to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And for all the hoo-ha about cutting emissions, in 2024 levels of the main greenhouse gases continued going up, carbon dioxide by 0.7 per cent and methane by 0.2 per cent.
The heating of our planet caused by these and other gases emitted by human activity, mostly in richer countries like ours, is a fact supported by an immense, world-wide, decades-long accumulation of scientific evidence. It is beyond question. Nobody – no CEO, no opinion writer, no blogger or influencer – can legitimately dispute it.
And no political leader, not even the new US president, Donald Trump. But that won’t stop him trying. All the tricks in the climate denial playbook will be brought to bear as this powerful leader seeks to reverse President Biden’s push to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.
Trump has promised to reinvigorate US fossil fuel industries, deregulate oil and gas extraction and processing, withdraw his country (again) from the landmark Paris Agreement – again cutting finding to UN climate programs – and defund research in both renewable energy and climate change. He’s also floated the idea of abolishing the venerable Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The surge in renewable and battery industries triggered by Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, much of it happening in Republican states, has created expectations that Trump would be wise not to disrupt – including growing awareness that, unlike coal and gas, the fuel for renewable power is free.
But Trump’s win has brought ultra-conservative movements like the America First Policy Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Texas Public Policy Foundation into mainstream politics. Backed by fossil fuel industry billionaires, they aim to see oil and gas production dramatically expanded, renewable rollout stalled, and climate and environmental science represented as left-wing ideology.
DeSmog, a global journalism body that reports on climate misinformation, has identified a dozen or more current or former members of these organisations among Trump’s nominees for key posts in his administration, including Pam Bondi (justice) and Lee Zeldin (environment). But the truth is that no-one expressing support for climate action would have been on Trump’s list to start with.
Trump has never conceded the 2020 presidential election to Biden, despite having lost the state-based Electoral College vote by 306 to 232 and the popular vote by 7.1 million – a result formally recognised by the US Congress. Asked in Senate confirmation hearings whether Joe Biden won the 2020 elections, nominees for positions in the Trump administration have declined to answer “yes”. That includes Bondi, soon to become attorney-general.
It’s the same story with climate. Now installed for the second time as president, Trump’s alternative universe is now in place. With cashed-up fossil-fuel interests cosying up to win his endorsement and a big following hanging on his every word, if he says the climate is fine then it is, thank you.
When Biden came to office four years ago, and especially after the passage of legislation to boost renewable energy, there was high hope in climate circles that the US position as a global action leader was locked in. The resurrection of Donald Trump has put paid to any such optimism.