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 this year.
The analysis from World Weather Attribution and Climate Central researchers comes at the end of a year that shattered climate record after climate record, as heat across the globe made this year likely to be the hottest ever measured, while a slew of other fatal weather events 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,” Friederike Otto, World Weather Attribution head and an Imperial College climate scientist, said at a news conference on the scientists’ findings. “As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse.”
Photo: AFP
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 nations, 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 barely broke.
To do its heat analysis, the team of volunteer international scientists compared daily temperatures around the globe this year to temperatures that would have been expected in a world without climate change. The results are not yet peer-reviewed, but the researchers used peer-reviewed methods.
Some areas saw 150 days or more of extreme heat due to climate change.
“The poorest, 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 is worse, 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°C warming limit compared with the preindustrial average, the scientists said. Earth is expected to soon edge past that threshold, 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 killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions, and found that 26 of them had clear links to climate change.
The El Nino 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, but the researchers said most of their studies found that climate change played a bigger role than that phenomenon in fueling this year’s events. Warm ocean waters and warmer air fueled more destructive storms, the researchers said, while higher temperatures led to many record-breaking downpours.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the research, said the science and findings were sound.
“Extreme weather will continue to become more frequent, intense, destructive, costly and deadly, until we can lower the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere,” she said.
Significantly more climate extremes could be expected without action, the UN Environment Programme said in the fall, as more planet-warming carbon dioxide has been sent into the air this year by burning fossil fuels than last year.
However, deaths and damage from extreme weather events are not inevitable, said Julie Arrighi, director of programs at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and part of the research.
“Countries can reduce those impacts by preparing for climate change and adapting for climate change, and while the challenges faced by individual countries or systems or places vary around the world, we do see that every country has a role to play,” she said.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
Pulled from the mud as an infant after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and reunited with his parents following an emotional court battle, the boy once known as “Baby 81” is now a 20-year-old dreaming of higher education. Jayarasa Abilash’s story symbolized that of the families torn apart by one of the worst natural calamities in modern history, but it also offered hope. More than 35,000 people in Sri Lanka were killed, with others missing. The two-month-old was washed away by the tsunami in eastern Sri Lanka and found some distance from home by rescuers. At the hospital, he was
‘DECREE 147’: Tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify accounts via phone numbers or IDs, and must provide users’ personal data to authorities on request New Vietnamese Internet rules requiring Facebook and TikTok to verify user identities and hand over data to authorities came into force yesterday, in what critics say is the latest attack on freedom of expression. Under “Decree 147,” all tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify users’ accounts via their phone numbers or Vietnamese identification numbers and store that information alongside their full name and date of birth. They must provide that data to authorities on request and remove any content that the government regards as “illegal” within 24 hours. All social media sites had been given 90 days to provide data on “the
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
RSS