WMO Confirms 2024 at About 1.55°C Above Pre-Industrial. For Power Systems, the Record Shows Up in Cooling Load
The WMO, the UN's weather and climate agency, published its State of the Global Climate 2024 report on 19 March 2025. It confirms that 2024 was the warmest year in the 175-year observational record, with a global mean near-surface temperature about 1.55°C above the 1850 to 1900 average, with a margin of uncertainty of plus or minus 0.13°C. The WMO says 2024 was likely the first calendar year more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, which published its own Global Climate Highlights in January, put 2024 at 1.60°C above pre-industrial using its ERA5 reanalysis, with a global average temperature of 15.10°C. That was 0.12°C above 2023, the previous record, and 0.72°C above the 1991 to 2020 average. ERA5 tends to produce slightly higher anomalies for recent years than the other datasets. Copernicus reported that 2024 was the warmest year on record for every continental region except Antarctica and Australasia.
The WMO report adds indicators beyond temperature, including ocean heat content, sea level rise, glacier mass loss and sea ice extent, several of which also set records in 2024. In countries with high air conditioning penetration, peak demand rises sharply with temperature during heatwaves. Warmer winters work in the opposite direction in heating-dominated systems, reducing gas and electricity demand for space heating. The International Energy Agency's Global Energy Review 2025, published in March, attributed a significant share of the growth in global electricity demand in 2024 to hot weather, particularly in China and India.
Transmission lines can carry less power when ambient temperatures are high, because conductors heat up and sag. The 2023 to 2024 El Niño event contributed to the record warmth, alongside the long-term warming trend. For energy planners, the relevant question is less whether a particular year breaks the record and more how the distribution of extreme temperatures is shifting. Gas and power traders already price weather through forward curves and degree-day forecasts, and those forecasts are anchored in historical normals.