This year is set be the hottest since global records began in 1850, the European Union's climate observation body said on Monday, after temperature data from the first eleven months showed 2024 is set to eclipse last year to become the warmest on record.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a briefing that global temperatures from January to November were some 0.14 degrees Celsius warmer than the same period last year, and represented a startling 0.72 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, with the findings likely to cause more concern over the impact of climate change.
In addition, C3S forecast that the average temperature of 2024 may exceed pre-industrial levels by 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time.
This puts more pressure on meeting one of the core goals of the landmark Paris Agreement, which aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
However, the latest data does not mean the Paris Agreement's temperature targets have been breached, but underscores the urgent need for greater climate action, said Samantha Burgess, C3S's deputy director.
The agency's data also showed that last month was the second-warmest November on record globally, behind 2023, with an average global temperature of 14.1 degrees Celsius across the month, which is 0.73 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average.
Additionally, Antarctic sea ice extent in November reached its lowest monthly value on record, and was recorded at 10 percent below the average.
2024 set to be hottest year on record: EU climate agency
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Tuesday revealed an artificial intelligence (AI) model system supporting scientific research, empowering multiple scientific domains including mathematics, physics and biology.
This marks a transition in AI-driven scientific research from fragmented and isolated exploration toward collaborative, efficient and platform-based innovation.
Named ScienceOne 100, the model system has been built on the basis of the scientific foundation model ScienceOne, with a cluster of multidisciplinary domain-specific large models.
ScienceOne provides three core functions: literature compass, innovation evaluation and agent factory, empowering the entire research and innovation workflow.
ScienceOne was released in 2025 and trained on professional scientific corpus and data. Its latest version has achieved flagship-level performance for scientific knowledge and agentic long-horizon reasoning, and has attained state-of-the-art results in terms of multiple benchmarks related to scientific image understanding and manipulation.
The model system currently comprises eight domain-specific large models, covering mathematics, physics, materials science, astronomy, environmental science, aerospace, geosciences and biology.
Zeng Dajun, deputy director of the Institute of Automation at CAS, cited the system's application in materials design as an example.
"In the design of various materials, catalyst design is a critical step. In the past, developing a new catalyst was highly time-consuming, requiring extensive literature review and numerous experiments. Now, with the ScienceOne 100 model system, research efficiency can be boosted by dozens of times," said Zeng.
The system has already been deployed and applied across over 50 CAS institutes, covering more than 100 research scenarios.
It has demonstrated tremendous potential in typical applications such as high-speed rail flow field reconstruction, spectral identification, materials discovery, adjuvant design, astronomical observation, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau scientific expedition, marine forecasting and ecological research.
Chinese Academy of Sciences unveils AI model system for scientific research
