Global average temperatures in 2024 were the hottest on record, surpassing the previous record set in 2023 by a clear margin. In three global temperature assessments released on 10 January, climate scientists reported that temperatures across the world rose faster than expected, reaching 1.46°C–1.62°C above the preindustrial baseline.“The long-term trends are very, very clear,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters at a 10 January briefing. “It’s warming more over the land than it is over the ocean. It’s warming more in the Northern Hemisphere, where there’s more land, than in the Southern Hemisphere, where there is less. And it’s warming most of all in the Arctic regions.”
In both 2023 and 2024, global average temperatures were hotter than expected, bucking the linear heating trend that had persisted for decades. Scientists believe that a combination of factors—but primarily record high greenhouse gas emissions—contributed to the recent warming acceleration.
“The abrupt new records set in 2023 and 2024 join other evidence that recent global warming appears to be moving faster than expected,” Robert Rohde, chief scientist at climate research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, said in a statement. Their report calls the recent trend an “exceptional warming spike.”
“Whether increased global warming is a temporary change or part of a new long-term trend remains to be seen,” Rohde said.
This map of Earth in 2024 shows global surface temperature anomalies, or how much warmer or cooler each region of the planet was compared to the average from 1951 to 1980. Normal temperatures are shown in white, higher than normal temperatures in red and orange, and lower than normal temperatures in blue. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization StudioRecord Warmth Across the Globe
Analyses from NOAA and NASA found that global average temperatures were 1.46°C–1.47°C (2.63°F–2.65°F) above the preindustrial baseline of 1850–1900, and 0.10°C (0.18°F) hotter than in 2023, the previous hottest year ever recorded. Berkeley Earth’s report concluded that temperatures were 1.62°C (2.91°F) above the preindustrial baseline.
Global average temperatures on both land and in the ocean were the hottest on record. Nowhere on Earth was there a record cold year.
“All of the groups agree, regardless of how they put the data together, regardless of what data they’re using,” that 2023 and 2024 were far hotter than expected.The NASA, NOAA, and Berkeley Earth temperature assessments differ primarily because of a choice in sea surface temperature datasets for the baseline reference period of 1850–1900. This typically results in the Berkeley Earth global average temperature calculation being hotter than the NASA and NOAA assessments. However, the teams generally use similar techniques and climate models, and so assessments for more recent years are more in agreement than those from the early 2
