“The last two years have been kind of supercharged,” says Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which assembles the agency’s global temperature record from thousands of weather stations, ocean buoys, and ship-based observatories. While Schmidt says temperatures have been gradually rising since the 1970s and climbing at a faster pace for about the last decade, “2023 and ‘24 really stand out.” 

In part, this is due to a recent El Niño, an event in which warming in the tropical Pacific Ocean boosts temperatures worldwide and causes knock-on weather effects. But Schmidt says it could also indicate an acceleration of human-driven global warming stemming from the fact that “we keep putting our foot on the accelerator of greenhouse gases.”

Either way, temperatures will continue to climb for as long as humans continue adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Within the next decade, Schmidt says, the world is likely to permanently breach the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold, meaning the planet will consistently cross it most, if not all, years. From there, the future continues to look hotter, with current climate policies leading to roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Along with the rise in temperatures, scientists expect we’ll continue to see an increase in extreme rainfall, excessively hot days, and climate-related disasters like wildfires and droughts.

“Every tenth of a degree, those things will become more intense and stronger,” Schmidt says.