May 2024 was the hottest May on record worldwide, becoming the 12the month in a row to beat its own record, the UN boss announced on Wednesday, citing the European Copernicus Observatory.
Copernicus made the announcement in a release coordinated with the UN weather agency and a speech by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in New York, in which he compared the threat posed by humanity to that of the meteorite that made the dinosaurs disappear.
With this series of records, “the average global temperature over the last 12 months [de juin 2023 à mai 2024] is the highest ever recorded”, according to Copernicus, or “1.63°C above the pre-industrial average of 1850-1900”, when humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions had not yet warmed the planet.
In May, the average global temperature on Earth and oceans was 1.52°C above the norm for May in the second half of the 19th century.e century.
May 2024 is therefore the “11e months in a row since July 2023 to reach or exceed pre-industrial era averages by 1.5°C.
This limit of 1.5°C is cited as an objective in the 2015 Paris agreement, signed by almost all countries. But such an anomaly would have to be observed on average over several decades to consider that the climate has stabilized at +1.5°C, which is not yet the case; It is not impossible that next year will be colder.
Over the past decade (2014-2023), the average rise is 1.19°C, compared to 1850-1900, according to a reference study published Wednesday in the journal Earth System Science Data and on which around sixty renowned researchers worked.
As for the year 2024, the natural climatic phenomenon El Niño, which has accentuated the effects of global warming for a year, “shows signs that it is coming to an end”, the World Meteorological Organization announced on Monday ( WMO).
The opposite cycle, La Niña, synonymous with cooler global temperatures, is expected to arrive later this year, according to the WMO.
But this cooling, climatologists warn, could be on average very small compared to the warming effect of humanity’s emissions.