After Back-to-Back Record Temperatures: Is Global Warming Accelerating?

A temporary spike or the start of an enduring — and concerning — trend?

Anomalies and extremes in surface air temperature in 2024. Colour categories refer to the percentiles of the temperature distributions for the 1991–2020 reference period. The extreme (‘coolest’ and ‘warmest’) categories are based on rankings for 1979–2024 (Source: Copernicus)

The world’s climate models have always been works in progress, but 2024 proved an unsettling truth: even our best scientific predictions keep falling short and underestimating reality.

But why does this matter to you?

Because for a third of the world’s population, this isn’t just data — it’s their reality. The heat is affecting people all over the world and it’s becoming painfully clear that we’re not prepared for what’s already happening.

Regions across the globe are heating up more intensely than anyone anticipated, creating mysterious hot spots where temperature records fall daily. Farmers watch crops wither under unprecedented heat. City planners and public officials scramble to protect millions from supercharged events. Insurance companies recalculate risk models that no longer work. We all need answers about our local climate future, but the models that guided our understanding of climate change are showing their limits, just when we need them most.

And the gap between global predictions and local experiences seems to be growing wider by the day.

From mid-2023 to June 2024, the world experienced a global jump in temperature unlike anything in modern history, a spike so sharp that pushed 2024’s average global temperatures 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — a threshold we weren’t supposed to hit for years. While this single-year mark doesn’t yet mean we’ve breached the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target for sustained warming, it’s an ominous milestone and a warning of what’s coming. As Gavin Schmidt from NASA points out, this temperature surge may not be surprising in the big picture, but that doesn’t make it any less concerning.

We thought we knew the timeline, but what’s happening now is outside of what anyone anticipated.

The next decades could bring changes that defy our current understanding of climate science. Here’s the question keeping scientists up at night: What if this sudden spike isn’t just a blip but a sign that our planet has already entered a new phase of accelerated warming?

The future we’ve been trying to predict may be arriving much sooner than we expected.

What’s Really Behind the Heat?

In early 2024, scientists were already bracing for a hot year due to the strong El Niño event. But they also anticipated that the heat would fade as the Pacific cooled.

That didn’t happen.