41 extra days of scorching heat in 2024, thanks to climate change!

In 2024, human-caused climate change added 41 extra days of dangerous heat worldwide, worsening extreme weather events like heatwaves, droughts, and cyclones. The year likely set heat records, disproportionately affecting vulnerable regions and causing numerous, often unreported, deaths

Washington: 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 2024.

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 2024 likely to be its hottest ever measured and a slew of other fatal weather events spared few.

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“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. “As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse.”

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 countries, 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 just barely broke.

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’s 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.