The world just had its hottest year ever recorded, and 2024 has already set a new heat record for the warmest January ever observed, according to the European Union's climate change monitoring service Copernicus.
The service said that January 2024 had a global average air temperature of 13.14 degrees Celsius, or 55.65 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature was 0.70 degrees Celsius above the 1991 to 2020 average for the month and 0.12 degrees Celsius above the last warmest January, in 2020.
It was also 1.66 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average for the month.
"2024 starts with another record-breaking month," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a news release announcing the findings. "Not only is it the warmest January on record but we have also just experienced a 12-month period of more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial reference period."
