The alarm is being raised, we are in danger of facing a total collapse?

Each month since June 2023 has been warmer than the one before it, so the average global temperature between July 2023 and June 2024 is 1.64 degrees Celsius higher than before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, when people started burning fossil fuels and released huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"This is more than a statistical oddity and highlights a large and continuing change in our climate. Even if this particular series of extremes ends at some point, we will certainly see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm. It is inevitable, except unless we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and oceans," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which published the report on rising temperatures, said in a statement.

The 12-month streak was partly caused by El Niño (a climate cycle in which waters in the tropical eastern Pacific become warmer than usual) that lasted from June 2023 to May 2024, leading to above-average sea temperatures across the eastern and central equatorial of the Pacific.

"The climate remains alarming. The last 12 months have been breaking records like never before, driven primarily by our greenhouse gas emissions and an additional boost from El Niño in the tropical Pacific," said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.

Scientists believe that global warming of two degrees above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures is an important threshold. A further rise in temperature significantly increases the likelihood of a devastating and irreversible climate breakdown.

But 1.5 °C is also an important limit. With that increase, the world's climate is approaching multiple tipping points that will cause heat waves, floods, famine and widespread ecosystem destruction, the United Nations warned in a 2018 special report.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries committed to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 °C and safely below 2 °C. While the new findings are worrying, the report emphasizes that the 1.5°C and 2°C limits are 20-30 year targets for the planet, meaning that the pledges have not yet been officially broken.

But the record high temperatures are unlikely to drop anytime soon, researchers say.

Scientists initially hoped the end of El Niño could delay the planet's warming, but the U.S. is still forecast to experience warmer-than-average temperatures through the end of the summer, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"I now estimate that there is about a 95 percent chance that 2024 will finish ahead of 2023 as the warmest year since records of global surface temperatures began in the mid-19th century," wrote Zeke Hausfater, a climatologist at the US-based nonprofit Berkeley Earth on the X Network .