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Case Western Reserve University physicist Cyrus Taylor can discuss implications of >1.5-degree C rise in global temperatures in 2024

News — CLEVELAND—, the Albert A. Michelson Professor in Physics at Case Western Reserve University, is available to provide his expertise for media coverage on why 2024 was the warmest year on record since record-keeping began 175 years ago.

NASA and NOAA will release their annual assessments of global temperatures and discuss the major climate trends of 2024 in a Friday at noon.

The agencies will announce 2024 was the first year temperatures rose more than the 1.5-degree C limit established by the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement.

“Does it mean that things are getting bad, or are they getting really bad?” Taylor said. “Breaking the 1.5-degree barrier by itself doesn’t spell immediate doom, but it’s a harbinger of things to come. The kinds of extreme weather events like we are seeing right now in California are going to get worse; the only debate is how quickly they are going to get worse. It should be a wakeup call.”

Taylor presented his research on the observed global mean temperature and its relationship to increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and the intrinsic variability of Earth’s weather at the American Geophysical Union conference in December. His contribution was titled, “How Strange Were Temperatures in 2023-2024?”

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