The Planet Just Spent a Full Year Above 1.5° Celsius: What Does This Mean for the Paris Climate Targets?

June 2024 marked the twelfth consecutive month that the average global temperature was 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the pre-industrial average, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. This string of record-high temperatures marks a trend that, if it is to continue into the years to come, could mean that we are already on the cusp of missing the lower temperature target set out by the Paris Climate Accords.

This past June saw global temperatures that averaged 16.66°C (62°F) over the course of the month, making it the hottest June on record, clocking in at 0.67°C (1.2°F) over the average for the past thirty months of June; additionally, it was the third hottest month on record overall, coming in behind July and August of last year.

“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a continuing shift in our climate,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo warned in a statement.

This year-long average above 1.5°C does come with a caveat: although the global temperature has surpassed the lower target set out in the Paris Agreement over the past 12 months, Buontempo cautions that there needs to be a much longer-term trend above this threshold across a span of decades for Paris to be surpassed, as it is possible that in the near future surface temperatures may still dip below the 1.5°C mark.

As it stands, the current thirty-year average is only 1.28°C (2.3°F), not yet a deal-breaker for Paris, but the continuation of an alarming trend nonetheless, and may officially surpass the Paris target by early 2033.

Heat waves, exacerbated by the effects of global warming, affected “Southeast Europe, Turkey, eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, North Africa and western Antarctica” last month, according to Copernicus; the world’s oceans fared even worse, despite the ebb of El Niño conditions in the equatorial Pacific, with June marking the 15th straight month that sea surface temperatures broke heat records.

Findings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concur with those made by the agency’s European counterpart: although NOAA uses the warmer mid-twentieth century average temperature (15.5°C, or 59.9°F) as their benchmark, they stated that “the June global surface temperature was 1.22°C (2.20°F) above the 20th-century average,” marking “the 13th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures.”