World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts.
This first year-long breach doesn't break that landmark Paris agreement, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.
Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists say. The period from February 2023 to January 2024 reached 1.52C of warming, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The following graph shows how that compares with previous years.
At the current rate of emissions, the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5C as a long-term average - rather than a single year - could be crossed within the next decade.
This would be a hugely symbolic milestone, but researchers say it wouldn't mark a cliff edge beyond which climate change will spin out of control.
The impacts of climate change would continue to accelerate, however with every little increase in warming - something that the extreme heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods over the past 12 months have given us a taste of.
An extra half a degree - the difference between 1.5C and 2C of global warming - also greatly increases the risks of passing so-called tipping points.
These are thresholds within the climate system which, if crossed, could lead to rapid and potentially irreversible changes.
For example, if the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets passed a tipping point, their potentially runaway collapse could cause catastrophic rises to global sea-levels over the centuries that followed.
But researchers are keen to emphasise that humans can still make a difference to the world's warming trajectory.
The world has made some progress, with green technologies like renewables and electric vehicles booming in many parts of the world.
This has meant some of the very worst case scenarios of 4C warming or more this century - thought possible a decade ago - are now considered much less likely, based on current policies and pledges.
And perhaps most encouragingly of all, it's still thought that the world will more or less stop warming once net zero carbon emissions are reached. Effectively halving emissions this decade is seen as particularly crucial.
A Guest Editorial