How to make sense of 2024’s wild temperatures
Our climate team highlight four charts and two maps
ON JANUARY 10th a number of the bodies which monitor the world’s climate put out their assessments of 2024. They confirmed that it was the hottest year since modern record-keeping began and thus, it is believed, in human history. It also contained the hottest day in that record. Among the five main data sets that try to capture global temperatures, one showed the average in 2023 to be more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. In 2024 three did.
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