Despite how easy it is to lose hope with news like this, I think the main take-away should not be that it will be hard to step up and take action to limit the impacts of climate change, but that it is possible: We have agency. One of the clearest messages of our work is that our choices matter.

2b. However, it will not be long before this long-term signal also exceeds the 1.5°C mark. This is no reason for defeatism and apathy - if anything, it should increase our sense of urgency to change course and prevent even worse things. Every tenth of a degree matters, regardless of Paris goals.

2a. One annual average crossing of 1.5°C does not mean "game over" for the Paris goals. In fact, the long-term human-made temperature increase contributed "only" about 1.4°C, and the rest is natural variability (mainly El Niño - albeit a rather untypical one).

1b. We do not know (yet) if this was mainly due to 2024 being an inherently more predictable year, or if this is something that would in principle have worked so well in any year, but we absolutely intend to find out.

1a. What's really interesting about this is that when we first made a prediction in September, we arrived at almost the exact same number (with greater uncertainty). We were unsure about the stability of this estimate, but it turns out, it didn't change much at all over the remaining months.