by James Murphy December 11, 2024 ( December 11, 2024 )
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Climate-change zealots from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) have announced that 2024 will with “virtual certainty” be the hottest year on record. This comes only a year after the same agency declared 2023 the hottest year on record. Last year, the same organization reported that 2023 was the warmest the Earth had seen in 125,000 years.
Exceeding the Limit
C3S claims that 2024 will be the first year that the global average temperature will exceed the 1.5ºC pre-industrial limit determined by the Paris climate agreement.
“With just one month of the year left, it is effectively certain that 2024 will be warmer than 2023, and thus the warmest calendar year on record,” C3S’s report on November’s surface air temperatures noted:
November 2024 was the second warmest month of November globally in the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, according to the latest monthly update of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). With this data, it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and that the global average temperature will exceed the 1.5ºC limit above the pre-industrial average set by the Paris Agreement. Around Antarctica, the sea ice saw its lowest extent on record for November.
According to C3S, last November was the “16th month of the last 17 months with … global average surface air temperatures above 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial levels.”
Samantha Burgess, C3S’s deputy director, said in a statement:
With Copernicus data in from the penultimate month of the year, we can now confirm with virtual certainty that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first calendar year above 1.5°C. This does not mean that the Paris Agreement has been breached, but it does mean ambitious climate action is more urgent than ever.
The agency warned that several weather and climate anomalies were associated with the supposed record warmth, including below-average precipitation in western and central Europe; above-average precipitation in parts of Iceland, the United Kingdom, Greece, the Balkans, and much of Eastern Europe; record-low sea-ice extent in Antarctica; and several typhoons in the western Pacific.
Climate Realists Disagree
Not all climate experts agree with the C3S assessment.
“The Copernicus Climate Change Service has been wrong before and will likely be wrong again, since it uses aggregate data fed through flawed climate models to produce temperature outputs,” Dr. H. Sterling Burnett of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute told The New American:
We have no temperature readings for the vast majority of human history, much less the Earth’s history, but the proxy data that we do have strongly suggests that temperatures have been warmer for long periods during the Holocene than they are at present, with those periods corresponding to civilization’s flourishing and beneficial times for human food production, productivity, exploration and health.
C3S’s “hottest year” claims come courtesy of their “reanalysis” tool. What exactly is reanalysis?
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, reanalysis combines “past observations with models to generate consistent time series of multiple climate variables.” So, their claim has little to do with the Earth’s actual temperature and more to do with how their computer analyzes the data input by climate-zealot scientists.
C3S openly admits that their data sets only go back to 1940. That data is then reanalyzed through a climate model to come up with a reading acceptable to them. Therefore, any claims of “hottest year ever” from them should be viewed through an extremely skeptical lens.
