Copernicus Climate Change Service
Copernicus reports that 2024 was the warmest year on record
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Eleven of the year's twelve months came in above 1.5°C. The twelfth was July — which is why "a full calendar year past the threshold" is the wrong way to read it.
What Copernicus published on 10 January
On 10 January 2025 the Copernicus Climate Change Service released its Global Climate Highlights analysis, confirming 2024 as the warmest year in global temperature records extending back to 1850.
Using the ERA5 reanalysis, it calculated a global-average surface-air temperature of 15.10°C for the year — 0.12°C above the record set in 2023, and 0.72°C above the 1991–2020 average.
Copernicus put the 2024 average at 1.60°C above the designated 1850–1900 pre-industrial level, the first calendar year to exceed 1.5°C on that dataset.
An annual average, not a continuous year
The finding concerns the year's average. In ERA5, eleven of twelve months ran above 1.5°C; July did not.
Nor does an annual average mean every day or every place was 1.5°C warmer. The 15.10°C figure is an absolute global mean; 1.60°C is its anomaly against the pre-industrial estimate.
"Warmest on record" refers to the instrumental and reconstructed datasets used in the analysis, which reach back to 1850 — not to all of human or geological history.
Not a declaration that Paris was breached
Copernicus explicitly cautioned that one or two individual years above 1.5°C do not mean the Paris Agreement's long-term temperature goal has been breached.
Estimates also vary by dataset and baseline: individual centres reported 2024 anomalies from 1.46°C to 1.62°C, and the WMO's consolidation of six datasets gave 1.55°C ± 0.13°C.
All six major datasets Copernicus monitors placed 2024 first, and the release said human-induced climate change remained the primary driver, with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation also contributing.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 2 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The 1.60°C figure is Copernicus's ERA5 estimate. Individual centers reported anomalies from 1.46°C to 1.62°C because of dataset and baseline differences.
- The WMO's consolidated estimate was 1.55°C with an uncertainty margin of ±0.13°C.
- The Paris Agreement concerns long-term warming, generally assessed over decades, rather than a single calendar-year anomaly.