Over the past two years, temperature records have been repeatedly shattered by a streak so persistent and puzzling it has tested the best-available scientific predictions about how the climate functions.
But they are still debating what might have contributed to this particularly exceptional heat surge.
“Warming in 2023 was head-and-shoulders above any other year, and 2024 will be as well,“ said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in November.
“We’re still in the process of assessing what happened and if we are seeing a shift in how the climate system operates.”
When burned, fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap heat near the Earth's surface.
But in an unprecedented streak between June 2023 and September 2024, global temperatures were unlike anything seen before, said the World Meteorological Organization -- and sometimes by a considerable margin.
“The record global warmth of the past two years has sent the planet well into uncharted territory,“ Richard Allan, a climate scientist from the UK’s University of Reading, told AFP.
“But the overall long-term warming tendency is not unexpected” given the amount of fossil fuels being burned, she added.
Scientists said that climate variability could go some way to explaining what happened.
This energy was released back to the surface when an opposite, warming El Nino event took over in mid-2023, boosting global temperatures.
Temperatures have not fallen as fast as they rose, and November was still the second-warmest on record.
“If temperatures do not drop more sharply in 2025, we will really have to ask ourselves questions about the cause,“ he told AFP.
Scientists are looking for clues elsewhere.
In December, another peer-reviewed paper looked at whether a reduction in low-lying clouds had let more heat reach Earth's surface.
There are concerns that without a more complete picture, scientists could be missing even more profound and transformational shifts in the climate.
Scientists this year warned that Earth’s carbon sinks -- such as the forests and oceans that suck CO2 from the atmosphere -- had suffered an “unprecedented weakening” in 2023.
Oceans, which have acted as a massive carbon sink and climate regulator, were warming at a rate scientists “cannot fully explain”, said Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“Could this be a first sign of a planet starting to show a loss of resilience? We cannot exclude it,“ he said last month.
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