In May, the world celebrated 12 consecutive months of record high temperatures – World

European climate observatory Copernicus announced on Wednesday that May 2024 was the hottest month on record, meaning the world has broken monthly records for a year in a row.

With this series of records, according to Copernicus, “the global average temperature over the past 12 months (June 2023 to May 2024) is the highest on record,” that is, “1.63°C above the pre-industrial average of 1850 – 1900,” when human greenhouse gas emissions had not yet begun to warm the planet.

The announcement coincided with a speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in New York, where he compared the threat posed by meteorites to humanity to that posed by the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

In May, the global average land and ocean temperature was 1.52°C above the normal temperature for May in the second half of the 19th century.

May 2024 therefore marks the 11th consecutive month since July 2023 when temperatures reached or exceeded 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average.

This 1.5°C limit was set as a target in the 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by almost all countries.

However, such anomalies need to be observed on average for several decades before the climate can be considered to have stabilized at +1.5°C, and this has not yet happened, which means that it is not impossible that next year will be colder than the previous year.

In the past decade (2014-2023), the average temperature has risen by 1.19°C compared to 1850-1900, according to a reference study published on Wednesday in the journal Earth System Science Data, which involved about 60 well-known researchers.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced on Monday that in 2024, El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon that exacerbates the effects of global warming, “is showing signs of coming to an end.”

The opposite cycle, La Nina, a byword for cooling global temperatures, is set to arrive later this year, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

But climate scientists warn that this cooling is likely to be very weak on average compared with the opposite effect: warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions.