2024 set to be hottest year on record as Scotland sees 18°C day in November

Scientists are “virtually certain” this year will be the world’s hottest since records began, eclipsing the highs of 2023.

It comes as temperatures climbed to 17.8°C at Kinloss in Scotland on Wednesday, and 17.9°C in Thomastown in Ireland. The Met Office said Kinloss could even be hotter on Thursday, reaching a high of 18°C.

In Cardiff and London, temperatures are predicted to hit 15°C, while Manchester and Newcastle could reach 14°C on Thursday, according to the Met Office.

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said that from January to October, the average global temperature had been so high that 2024 was sure to be the world’s hottest year. The temperature anomaly – the departure from a long-term average or baseline value – in the rest of the year would need to plunge to an unprecedented near-zero for this not to be the case.

This year’s global-average temperature anomaly is 0.71°C above the 1991-2020 average, the highest on record for this period and 0.16°C warmer than the same period in 2023.

“The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change,” C3S Director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters.

“The climate is warming, generally. It’s warming in all continents, in all ocean basins. So we are bound to see those records being broken,” he said.

The data was released ahead of next week’s UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries will try to agree a huge increase in funding to tackle climate change.

Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election has dampened expectations for the talks.

The scientists said 2024 will also be the first year in which the planet is more than 1.5°C hotter than in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.

Evidence shows carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas are the main cause of climate change. When released into the air, the carbon dioxide emissions cause the planet to heat up.

Every fraction of temperature increase fuels extreme weather. In October, catastrophic flash floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record wildfires tore through Peru, and flooding in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, sending food prices skyrocketing.

In the US, Hurricane Milton killed at least 24 people and caused severe damage when it made landfall.

Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at public research university ETH Zurich, said she was not surprised by the milestone, and urged governments at COP29 to agree stronger action to wean their economies off CO2-emitting fossil fuels.

“The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world,” Seneviratne said.

Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5°C, to avoid its worst consequences.

The world has not breached that target – which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5°C over decades – but C3S now expects the world to exceed the Paris goal around 2030.

“It’s basically around the corner now,” Mr Buontempo said.

Earlier this year, Copernicus scientists reported global temperatures reached exceptionally high levels in 2023.

They found the year had a global average temperature of 14.98°C, 0.17°C higher than the previous highest annual value in 2016.

It was also 0.60°C warmer than the 1991-2020 average and 1.48°C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level.

It comes after the Met Office revealed that higher temperatures across the UK last month brought the October average to 10.4°C – 0.7°C above the 1991-2020 average. Not one county across the UK was below average for mean October temperature, the weather service said.

Additional reporting by Reuters.