People around the world have experienced an average of 41 extra days of dangerous heat this year due to human causes climate changeaccording to a group of scientists who also said climate change worsened much of the world’s harmful weather throughout 2024.
The analysis by researchers at World Weather Attribution and Climate Central comes at the end of a year that broke climate record after climate record. Heat all over the world probably made 2024 the hottest year on record measured and contributed to a number of other fatal weather events that spared few.
“The finding is devastating but not surprising: 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 is more likely and more intense around the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often untold numbers of people,” said Friederike Otto, World Weather Attribution Manager and Climate Scientist at Imperial College, during a press conference on the scientists’ discoveries.
“As long as the world continues to burn fossil fuels, this will only get worse,” Otto warned.
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Millions of people have suffered from sweltering heat this year. Northern California and Death Valley in the oven. Daytime temperatures scorched Mexico and Central America. The heat put already vulnerable children in danger in West Africa. Soaring temperatures in southern Europe forced Greece to close the Acropolis. In South and Southeast Asian countries, the heat forced schools to close.
Earth experienced some of the the hottest days ever measured and his the hottest summer yetwith a 13-month hot streak that was barely broken.
To do their heat analysis, the team of volunteer international scientists compared daily temperatures around the world in 2024 with temperatures that would have been expected in a world without climate change. The results have not yet been peer-reviewed, but the researchers use peer-reviewed methods.
Some areas saw 150 days or more of extreme heat due to climate change, they found.
“The poorest and least developed countries on the planet are the places that are experiencing even higher numbers,” 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 waves. But if we can’t communicate convincingly, ‘but actually a lot of people are dying,’ it’s a lot harder to raise 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, scientists say. The Earth is expected to soon exceed this threshold, although it is not considered to have been exceeded until the warming continues for decades.
Researchers took a closer look at 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 this year. However, the researchers said most of their studies found that climate change played a bigger role than this phenomenon in fueling the 2024 events. Warmer ocean waters and warmer air fueled storms more destructive, according to researchers, while temperatures 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 research, said the science and findings were solid.
“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,” he said.
Much more climate extremes could be expected without action, the United Nations Environment Program said in the fall, as more planet-warming carbon dioxide has been sent into the air this year by the burning of fossil fuels than last year.
“Countries can reduce these impacts by preparing for and adapting to climate change, and while the challenges facing individual countries, systems or places vary around the world, we see that each country has a role to play,” he said.
The warnings come amid concerns in many countries that the US government, under President-elect Donald Trump, will start revoking commitments Washington did in January to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and work to transition to more sustainable energy production.
Trump has made that clear believes that fears about climate change are exaggerated, and has previously dismissed the notion of human-caused global warming as a hoax. In his first term as president, Trump floundered 100 environmental standards promulgated by his predecessor Barack Obama.