'Ambitious climate action more urgent than ever' with 2024 the warmest year on record
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This will be the first calendar year that temperatures have been 1.5°C above pre-industrial times, according to a European study being released on Monday, with Irish climate experts saying this underlines the need for climate action to be a priority for the incoming government.
The latest report from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service says it can “now confirm with virtual certainty that 2024 will be the warmest year on record”.
It states that while the development does not mean the Paris Agreement has been breached, “it does mean ambitious climate action is more urgent than ever.”
Under the Paris Agreement at the Cop21 climate change summit, a target was set of a 1.5C rise in global temperatures, compared to 1850-1900, as the limit to avoid the very worst fallout from climate change.
Last month, according to the Climate Action Tracker — an independent scientific project — “minimal progress” has been made in curbing expected global temperature rises since Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021.
The Copernicus report highlighted that November 2024 was 1.62°C above the pre-industrial level and was the 16th month in a 17-month period for which the global-average surface air temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
The latest Copernicus report comes as a scoping meeting by the inter-governmental panel on climate change for its seventh report takes place in Kuala Lumpar from Monday to Friday.
Among those attending is Prof Peter Thorne, of Maynooth University, who said the latest report from Copernicus brings “another sad milestone in a litany of milestones that we continue to break”.
He is hopeful that climate will still be a key part of the programme for Government, pointing out that the amended Climate Action Act 2021 was passed almost unanimously and had the support of almost all the major parties.
However, he said that Ireland has “over-participated” in climate change because of carbon emissions.
He added: “The priority [for the new Government] needs to be ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ as we declare in the synthesis report of the inter-governmental panel on climate change.
"We have gone past the point where you can pick and choose policies and still be consistent with a 1.5°C
or even 2°C of warming.
"You need to pull every policy level, every taxation lever, every spending lever.”
Oisín Coghlan, of Friends of the Earth, said the Copernicus report shows that “climate change is not going away”.
He added that if Fine Gael and Fianna Fail come together to form the next Government, they will no longer have the Green Party to blame for unpopular climate decisions.
However, he said: “They will still be responsible for delivering the legally binding targets that they voted for through the climate law and the climate targets. The question is how will they do that.”
Hannah Daly, a professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork, said the world is moving “far too slowly towards sustainable energy and food systems" while living with the consequences of an overheated planet.
She added: “The danger now is that we become immune to news as climate records continue to be broken — that it becomes like a background condition that we become resigned to.
"We have to mobilise a major societal and political response, to cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible."
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