Climate change fueled some of the worst extreme weather events on record in 2024, according to a recent report.
Researchers at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central reviewed heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that struck in 2024, and found that nearly every extreme weather event they studied was “made more intense and more frequent because of our continued burning of fossil fuels.”
While the record-breaking weather of 2024 wasn’t surprising, “it was alarming,” report co-author Ben Clarke, a researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, U.K., told Mongabay by email.
For instance, 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first when average global temperatures crossed 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. While breaching the Paris Agreement’s limit of 1.5°C would require surpassing this temperature threshold for several years, “it is a warning that we are getting dangerously close,” the authors write.
Climate change also made nearly every heat wave in 2024 hotter, the report notes, and exposed people to an additional 41 days of dangerous heat on average.
Hotter oceans fueled by climate change also drove more powerful tropical cyclones, which includes typhoons and hurricanes. In the U.S., for instance, Hurricane Helene became the deadliest to strike the mainland since Katrina in 2005, killing more than 230 people. Consecutive typhoons made deadlier by climate change also hit the Philippines late last year, affecting millions of people.
Droughts also affected every continent, made more likely and intense because of climate change. The most prominent was the drought that gripped the Amazon River Basin for a second year running.
“The Amazon drought was particularly exceptional,” Clarke said. “Our study found climate change made the event 30 times more likely, which is a huge increase for a drought.”
Since the Amazon Rainforest stores massive amounts of carbon, “continued warming could cause widespread tree dieback and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” he added. “This in turn causes a feedback loop, making tackling climate change much more difficult.”
The report also found that climate change’s influence overshadowed that of naturally occurring climate phenomenon like El Niño in fueling extreme events, including the Amazon drought.
“Our study found that the low rainfall was influenced about equally by climate change and El Niño,” Clarke said. “However, climate change was the main driver of the persistent heat that evaporated moisture from soils and plants.”
For 2025, the authors stress on the importance of improving early-warning systems as well as the real-time reporting of heat-related deaths. They also call for an urgent shift away from burning fossil fuels.
“Our report shows how dangerous climate change has already become,” Clarke said. “It is no longer a distant threat, but a current reality that is making life much harder for people on every continent.
Banner image of average surface air temperature across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia in June 2024, courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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