Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in London.

I'm Tim Franks. We're beginning with a clash between hard data and metaphor. The hard data is new evidence that the world is hotter than it's ever been, or at least since records began.

2024 was the first year that global temperatures were 1.6 degrees above the pre-industrial average.

Remember that back in 2015, the world's nations all agreed that we needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.

That's the hard data.

The battle with language that I mentioned, that comes with a quote

today from the European Union climate monitoring body, Copernicus, which was the first to come out

with the most recent figures. And the director of the Copernicus agency is Carlo Buon Tempo,

who in his words says that he's run out of metaphors to explain the warming we're seeing.

Over the last few years, I try a different way of telling the story.

The story is the data.

But when we communicate, we try to add some explanation.

And in that sense, I really thought of what could be yet another metaphor we can use, another image.

And I decided that we use them all.

I think what is important is really that the data speaks for itself.

And something that happened today, which I think is important, is that all the main climate center worldwide have all pushed out their own calculation. And they are basically

all saying the same thing. And that is that this key figure of 1.5 degrees above a pre-industrial

average for the temperature around the world, that that has been breached in 2024, that

2024 was the hottest year on record?

There is an absolute agreement on the fact that 2024 is the hottest year on record.

Using the terminology of the IPCC, we can say that it's likely that the first year above 1.5 has passed.

And I guess there will be those who will be saying that doesn't mean that we breached the Paris

...