2024 officially hottest year on record as financial toll of disasters mounts

For the first time, average global temperatures were 1.5 degrees C higher than preindustrial levels for an entire calendar year — and 2024 was the warmest year on record — US and European scientists announced Jan. 10.

"As long as we're emitting greenhouse gases and until we get to net-zero, we will not get a leveling off of the global mean temperature," Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said during a call with reporters.

That does not mean, however, that each year will get progressively hotter. "Even if we likely exceeded 1.5 [degrees warming], that doesn't mean we've exceeded it in the context of the Paris Agreement, which is over a longer time period," Schmidt said.

In addition to energy consumption and other emissions sources, the El Niño weather pattern and record-warm ocean temperatures contributed to the rise in 2024, the scientists said.

Record-keeping for global temperatures began in 1850. Where 2025 will rank is uncertain now that El Niño has been replaced by the cooler weather pattern El Niña, the scientists said, although initial modeling suggests that the year will not set another record.

NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said they coordinated their announcements of the 2024 temperatures to make messaging a little clearer to the public. The various groups that estimate global temperatures use different methodologies and thus show slightly different results, but the overall trend is clear, their data shows.

"Each year in the last decade is one of the 10 warmest on record," Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in Copernicus' news release. "These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapor levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people."

The 2024 temperature assessment came the day after insurance giant Munich Re said North America suffered $190 billion in losses from natural disasters during the year, more than any other region. Of those losses — some of which have already been attributed to climate change — $108 billion were insured, Munich Re said.

Hurricane Helene, the world's costliest storm in 2024, is estimated to have caused $56 billion in damages, of which just $16 billion were borne by insurers, Munich Re's data showed.

Munich Re reported that globally, natural disasters caused $140 billion in insured losses in 2024. Only two other years have been more expensive, the company noted while citing the link between more violent storms and climate change.

Such disasters include wildfires that have increased in intensity with rising temperatures, Schmidt told reporters who asked about catastrophic blazes. In California, thousands were fleeing devastating fires in and around Los Angeles on Jan. 10, events that have not been attributed to climate change as of yet.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for President-elect Donald Trump's transition team, would not comment on the climate and disaster reports, but she said in an email that the incoming president will "deliver clean air and water for American families while making America wealthy again" when he returns to the White House.

China is the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, although historically the US is the largest emitter. The American per-capita carbon footprint is nearly twice as large as China's.