People around the world suffered an average of 41 more days of dangerous heat this year due to human causes climate changeaccording to a group of scientists who also said that climate change caused much of the world's severe weather through 2024.
The study from researchers World Weather Attribution and Climate Central comes at the end of a year that broke climate record after climate record. Global warming 2024 may be the hottest year on record measured and contributed to a series of other deadly weather events that spared very few.
“The finding is devastating but not surprising: climate change played a role, and often played a central role in most of the events we studied, making heat, drought, tropical cyclones and more likely and more intense heavy rain around the world, destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions and often untold numbers of people,” said Friederike Otto, director of the World Weather Attribution and Imperial College climate scientist, at media briefing on the scientists' findings.
“As long as the world continues to burn fossil fuels, this will only get worse,” Otto warned.
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Millions of people suffered from extreme heat this year. Northern California and Death Valley baked. Extreme daytime temperatures boosted Mexico and Central America. Heat was already endangering vulnerable children in West Africa. Skyrocketing temperatures in southern Europe forced Greece to close the Acropolis. In South and Southeast Asian countries, heat forced schools to close.
The Earth experienced some of the the hottest days ever recorded and a still hottest in summerwith a 13-month hot streak that had just broken.
To carry out their heat study, the team of international volunteer scientists compared daily global temperatures in 2024 to the temperatures expected in a world without climate change. The results are not yet peer-reviewed, but researchers use peer-reviewed methods.
Some areas saw 150 or more days of extreme heat due to climate change, they found.
“The poorest, least developed countries on the planet are the places where the numbers are even higher,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president of climate science at Climate Central.
What's worse, heat-related deaths are often under-reported.
“People don't have to die in heat. But if we can't communicate with certainty, 'but in fact a lot of people are dying,' it is much more difficult to raise this awareness,” said Otto. “Heat waves are the deadliest event, and those are the worst 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 warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the pre-industrial average, according to the scientists. The Earth is expected to pass that threshold soon, although it is not considered to have been breached until that warming is sustained over decades.
The researchers closely examined 29 extreme weather events this year that, in total, killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions, and found that 26 of them had clear links to climate change.
The El Niño weather pattern, which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather around the world, made some of this weather more likely earlier in the year. However, the researchers said most of their studies found that climate change played a bigger role than that phenomenon in triggering the 2024 events. Warmer ocean waters and warmer air prompting more damaging storms, according to the researchers, while the temperature caused much higher downpours.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Cape Cod who was not involved in the research, said the science and conclusions were good.
“Extreme weather will continue to become more frequent, more intense, damaging, costly and deadly, until we can reduce the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere,” she said.
Many more climate extremes could be expected without action, the United Nations Environment Program said this autumn, as more planet-warming carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere this year by burning fossil fuels than last year.
“Countries can reduce these impacts by preparing for climate change and adapting to climate change, and although the challenges facing individual countries or systems or places vary around the world, we seeing that every country has a place,” she said.
The warnings come amid concerns in many countries that the US government, under President-elect Donald Trump start returning pledges Washington did in January to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and work towards a transition to more sustainable energy production.
Trump has made that clear he believes that climate change fears are overblown, and has been dismissing the idea of human-caused global warming as false. In his first term as president, Trump turned back 100 environmental regulations implemented by his predecessor Barack Obama.
