People around the world suffered an average of 41 extra days of dangerous heat this year because of human-caused Climate Change, according to a group of scientists who also said that Climate Change worsened much of the world’s damaging weather throughout 2024.
The analysis from World Weather Attribution and Climate Central researchers comes at the end of a year that shattered climate record after climate record. Heat across the globe likely made 2024 the hottest year ever measured and contributed to a slew of other fatal weather events that spared few.
“The finding is devastating but utterly unsurprising: Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people,” the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto, said during a media briefing on the scientists’ findings yesterday.
“As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse,” Otto said.
Millions of people endured stifling heat this year. Northern California and Death Valley baked. Sizzling daytime temperatures scorched Mexico and Central America. Heat endangered already vulnerable children in West Africa. Skyrocketing Southern European temperatures forced Greece to close the Acropolis. In South and Southeast Asian countries, heat forced school closures.
Earth experienced some of the hottest days ever measured and its hottest-yet summer, with a 13-month heat streak that just barely broke.
To do its heat analysis, the team of volunteer international scientists compared daily temperatures around the globe in 2024 to the temperatures that would have been expected in a world without climate change. The results are not yet peer-reviewed, but researchers use peer-reviewed methods.
Some areas recorded 150 days or more of extreme heat due to climate change, they said.
“The poorest, least developed countries on the planet are experiencing even higher numbers,” said, Vice President of Climate Science at Climate Central Kristina Dahl.
Heat-related deaths are often underreported.
“People don’t have to die in heat waves.
But if we can’t communicate convincingly, “but actually a lot of people are dying,” it’s much harder to raise this awareness,” Otto said. “Heat waves are by far the deadliest extreme event, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.”
This year was a warning that the planet is getting dangerously close to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit compared to the pre-industrial average, according to the scientists. Earth is expected to soon edge past that threshold, although it’s not considered to have been breached until that warming is sustained over decades. Researchers closely examined 29 extreme weather events this year that, in aggregate, killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions, and found that 26 of them had clear links to climate change. – CBS
