Climate change brought extreme weather, heat in 2024: UN

Climate change sparked a trail of extreme weather and record heat in 2024, the United Nations said on Monday, urging the world to pull back from the "road to ruin."

The outgoing year is set to be the warmest ever recorded, the U.N.'s weather and climate agency said, capping a decade of unprecedented heat.

Meanwhile emissions of greenhouse gases grew to new record highs, locking in more heat for the future, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.

"Climate change plays out before our eyes on an almost daily basis in the form of increased occurrence and impact of extreme weather events," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said.

"This year we saw record-breaking rainfall and flooding events and terrible loss of life in so many countries, causing heartbreak to communities on every continent. Tropical cyclones caused a terrible human and economic toll, most recently in the French overseas department of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Intense heat scorched dozens of countries, with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius on a number of occasions. Wildfires wreaked devastation."

The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to 1.5C if possible.

In November, the WMO said the January-September mean surface air temperature was 1.54C above the pre-industrial average measured between 1850 and 1900.