ORLANDO, Fla. – I know what you are thinking. Reliable weather records only go back 150 years and that our planet goes through natural warming and cooling cycles. While part of this is true, there is no doubt Earth shattered its average surface temperature record in 2024.

Global temperatures in 2024 were 1.3 degrees Celsius, or 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, above NASA’s 20th century baseline. The new record comes after 15 consecutive months of monthly temperature records.

For more than half of the year, the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal. Efforts were set by the Paris Agreement on climate change to stay below this threshold.

“One of the things you think about are 1.3 degrees averaged over the whole planet. And that’s what we talk about when we’re talking about global temperature is the whole planet. But think about all of that heat, all of that heat going in across the world, all the oceans. That’s an incredible amount of heat, incredible amount of energy,” said Dr. Lesley Ott, a NASA Earth scientist.

The greatest detail in temperature records only go back 150 years, however, there are other methods in determining the temperature of our planet prior to that data.

“We still have lots of great science based ways to track warming even before that. So scientists look at things called ice cores. We can actually track with a little bit less detail, but understand that maybe the decade to century scale warming over many, many centuries and millennia to understand how this recent period fits into a long term trend. And that helps us understand how unusual all of this warming really is.” Ott said.

There is very strong agreement across the scientific community that the warming is due to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide and methane.

“And that’s due to human activities and combustion of fossil fuels. That doesn’t mean that there’s not natural variability. There’s there is natural variability and things like the El Niño, La Niña cycles. But also very clearly this trend upwards in trends in temperatures that we see over the course of the last century is due to warming from greenhouse gases,” Ott said.

“The fact that greenhouse gases are structured to increase heat. That’s basic science. So that’s not something new that’s been around that scientists discover that in the 1850s,” Ott said.

While no one weather event is caused by climate change, a warming climate increases significant and extreme weather events.

“When scientists look at things and this is one reason we have so much confidence and tying extremes due to climate, it’s not just any one event, it’s the aggregate and the number of these kinds of events that we’re seeing that gives us a lot of confidence in tying them to climate change and increase in temperatures,” Ott said.

For Florida, that means more frequent heavy rain events and sea level rise. Higher sea levels mean more damage from hurricanes and other storms. A warmer climate also increases the chances of storms rapidly intensifying.

“If you want to look on the optimistic side, I will say at NASA and NOAA, and across the federal government and even private sector, we’re working really hard to develop new instruments, new ways to observe the planet that help communities across the country, across the world navigate these kinds of challenges. So the warming we do expect to increase, but so is our capacity to deal with it and to deliver the science that we know people need,” Ott said.