CHICAGO – For the second year in a row, Earth will almost certainly be the hottest year ever. The world has reached warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the pre-industrial average for the first time this year, European climate agency Copernicus said on Thursday.

“I think this relentless nature of the warming is worrying,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.

Buontempo said the data clearly shows that the planet would not see such prolonged periods of record temperatures without the continued increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that fuel global warming.

He also touched on other factors that contributed to exceptionally warm years like last year and this year. These include El Niño (temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather patterns around the world), as well as volcanic eruptions that release water vapor into the air and changes in energy from the sun. But he and other scientists say long-term increases in temperatures beyond fluctuations like El Niño are a bad sign.

“A very strong El Niño event is a preview of what the new normal will be like ten years from now,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth.

The news that there will likely be a second year of record heat comes a day after the re-election of US Republican Donald Trump, who called climate change a “hoax” and promised to increase oil drilling and production. This also happened days before the next UN climate conference, called COP29, was due to begin in Azerbaijan. The talks are expected to focus on how trillions of dollars could be generated to help the world transition to clean energies such as wind and solar and prevent further warming.

Also Thursday, a report published by the United Nations Environment Program called for increased funding to adapt to global warming and its consequences. The $28 billion spent globally to adapt to climate change in 2022, the latest year for which data is available, was revealed to be an all-time high. But that amount is far below the estimated $187 to $359 billion needed each year to cope with the heat, floods, droughts and storms made worse by climate change.

“The world is in flames,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a pre-recorded statement on the report’s release. “Humanity is burning the planet and paying the price with the vulnerable people most affected,” he said.

“Frankly, there is no excuse for the world not to take adaptation seriously,” said UNEP director Inger Andersen. “We need well-funded and effective adaptation that includes justice and equity.”

Buontempo pointed out that exceeding the warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) for a single year is different from the target adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. That goal meant trying to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over an average of 20 or 30 years since pre-industrial times.

A United Nations report this year said the world has already warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) on average since the mid-1800s; this was 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) or 1.2 degrees (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) below previous estimates. ). This is worrying because the UN says the world’s nations’ greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets are still not ambitious enough to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius target.

The target was chosen to eliminate the worst effects of climate change on humanity, including extreme weather. “The heat waves, storm damage and droughts we are experiencing now are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Natalie Mahowald, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said that exceeding that number in 2024 does not mean that the overall trend line for global warming has been exceeded, but that “in the absence of concerted action, it will soon be exceeded.”

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson put it more clearly. “I think we missed the 1.5-degree window,” said Jackson, head of the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track countries’ carbon dioxide emissions. “There’s a lot of heat.”

Indiana state climate scientist Beth Hall said she wasn’t surprised by Copernicus’ latest report, but stressed that people need to remember that climate is a global issue, beyond their local experiences with changing weather. “We tend to be silenced in our own individual worlds,” he said. Reports like this “take into account a lot of places that are not in our backyard.”

Buontempo emphasized the importance of global observations supported by international collaboration, which gives scientists confidence in the new report’s finding: Copernicus draws its results from billions of measurements from satellites, ships, planes and weather stations around the world.

He said going above the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) standard this year was “psychologically important” as nations make internal decisions and move closer to negotiations at the annual U.N. climate change summit in Azerbaijan Nov. 11-22.

“The decision, of course, is ours. It belongs to each of us. And it’s a decision that our society and our policymakers make as a result of that,” he said. “But I believe these decisions would be better made if they were based on evidence and facts.”