Climate change added 41 days of dangerous heat around world in 2024
Associated PressPeople 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 2024. “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, the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist, said during a media briefing on the scientists’ findings. To do its heat analysis, the team of volunteer international scientists compared daily temperatures around the globe in 2024 to the temperatures that would have been expected in a world without climate change. “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 warming limit compared to the pre-industrial average, according to the scientists.