This year, people around the world have suffered an average of 41 extra human-caused days of dangerous heat climate changeaccording to a group of scientists who also said climate change has worsened most of the world's harmful weather through 2024.
The analysis by researchers at World Weather Attribution and Climate Central comes at the end of a year that has broken climate record after climate record. Heat all over the world likely making 2024 the hottest year on record is measured and contributes to a number of other fatal weather phenomena that have not escaped few.
“The discovery is devastating, but not at all surprising: climate change did play a role, and often a major one, in most of the events we studied, causing heat, drought, tropical cyclones and heavy precipitation is more likely and more intense around the world, destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions and often countless people,” said Friederike Otto, head of the World Weather Attribution and a climate scientist at Imperial College, during a media briefing on the scientists' findings.
“As long as the world continues to burn fossil fuels, it will only get worse,” Otto warned.
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This year, millions of people experienced suffocating heat. Baked in Northern California and Death Valley. Mexico and Central America were gripped by sharp daytime temperatures. The heat has threatened already vulnerable children in West Africa. A sharp increase in temperature in southern Europe forced Greece to close the Acropolis. In the countries of South and Southeast Asia, the heat has forced schools to close.
Earth has experienced some of the the hottest days ever recorded and his the hottest summerwith a 13-month heat streak barely broken.
To conduct the heat analysis, a team of international volunteer scientists compared daily temperatures around the world in 2024 with temperatures that would be expected in a world without climate change. The results are not yet peer-reviewed, but the researchers use peer-reviewed methods.
They found that some areas experienced extreme heat for 150 days or more due to climate change.
“The poorest, least developed countries on the planet are the places that are experiencing even greater numbers,” said Christina Dahl, vice president of climate science at Climate Central.
Worse, heat-related deaths often go unreported.
“People don't necessarily die in the heat. But if we can't communicate convincingly, 'but actually a lot of people are dying,' it's much harder to raise that awareness,” Otto said. “Heat waves are by far the deadliest extreme event, and it's the extreme events where climate change really changes the game.”
According to scientists, this year was a warning that the planet is dangerously close to the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit set by the Paris Agreement, compared to the pre-industrial average. The Earth is expected to soon exceed this threshold, although it is not considered breached until the warming continues for decades.
Researchers scrutinized 29 extreme weather events this year, which have collectively killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions, and found that 26 of them were clearly linked to climate change.
The El Niño weather pattern, which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather around the world, has made some of these weather conditions more likely earlier in the year. However, the researchers said that most of their studies showed that climate change played a bigger role than this phenomenon in fueling the 2024 events. Warmer ocean waters and warmer air have fueled more destructive storms, according to researchers, while temperatures have led to many record-breaking downpours.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center on Cape Cod, who was not involved in the study, said the science and conclusions are sound.
“Extreme weather will continue to become more frequent, intense, destructive, costly and deadly until we can reduce the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere,” she said.
The United Nations Environment Program said in the fall that far more climate extremes can be expected without action, as more global-warming carbon dioxide is released into the air from burning fossil fuels this year than last year.
“Countries can reduce these impacts by preparing for and adapting to climate change, and while the challenges faced by individual countries, systems or locations vary around the world, we see that every country has a role to play,” she said. she
The warnings came amid concerns in many countries that the US government under President-elect Donald Trump would start decommitting made by Washington in January to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and work toward a transition to more sustainable energy production.
Trump made that clear he believes fears about climate change are overblown and has previously dismissed the notion of human-caused global warming as a hoax. In his first term as president, Trump was impeached 100 environmental regulations introduced by his predecessor Barack Obama.