STORY: The world just experienced the first full year in which global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times, scientists said on Friday.

2024 saw temperatures rise on every continent, resulting in heatwaves, drought and extreme weather.

The milestone was confirmed on Friday by scientists at the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

They're warning that climate change is pushing the planet's temperature to levels never experienced by modern humans.

Here's Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

"Every single month, January to July has been the warmest record. July was the second warmest and from then on has been the second or close to first, around. But when you put all the all of those together then the trajectory is is just incredible and sums up to the warmest year on record."

The planet's average temperature in 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than in 1850-1900.

That's the "pre-industrial period" before humans began burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels on a large scale.

What's more, 2024 was the world's hottest since records began, and each of the past ten years was among the ten warmest on record.

Governments promised under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent average temperatures exceeding the symbolic threshold of 1.5C, to avoid more severe and costly climate disasters.

Yet despite this the first year above 1.5C does not breach that target, which measures the longer-term average temperature.

According to Buontempo, it's not too late for countries to rapidly cut emissions and avoid global warming rising further - although they need to act fast.

"The Paris Agreement will be breached in the near future. We can discuss whether it will be the late 2020s, early 2030s, but we are bound to reach 1.5 in the terms of the Paris Agreement and exceed it."

"It's not a done deal. We have the power to change the trajectory from now on. We can do it, but we need to do it based our actions on science, on evidence, and there are plenty of evidence available that we can base our actions on."

The impacts of climate change are now visible on every continent, affecting people from the richest to the poorest countries on earth.

It is worsening storms and torrential rainfall, because a hotter atmosphere can hold more water, leading to intense downpours.

But even as the costs of these disasters spiral, political will to invest in curbing emissions has waned in some countries.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has called climate change a hoax, despite the global scientific consensus that it is human-caused and will have severe consequences if not addressed.