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| Photo Credit: V Raju

New Delhi:

The world experienced an average of 41 more days of extreme heat in 2024 due to climate change, a new report said on Friday. According to the European climate agency Copernicus, 2024 is set to end as the warmest year on record and the first year with a global average temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

A yearly review report by two groups of climate scientists — World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central — said the world saw an average of 41 more days of dangerous heat in 2024.

Small island developing states were hit the hardest, with their people experiencing over 130 additional hot days.

The scientists identified 219 extreme weather events in 2024 and studied 29 of them. They found that climate change contributed to at least 3,700 deaths and displaced millions in 26 extreme weather events.

“It is likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens or hundreds of thousands,” the report said.

The floods in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad were the deadliest event studied by the group, with at least 2,000 people killed.

The study found that if global warming reached two degrees Celsius, which could happen as early as the 2040s or 2050s, these regions might face similar heavy rainfall events every year.

Friederike Otto, lead of WWA and senior lecturer in climate science at the Imperial College, London, said, “The impacts of fossil fuel warming have never been clearer or more devastating than in 2024. We are living in a dangerous new era.” “We know exactly what we need to do to stop things from getting worse — stop burning fossil fuels. The top resolution for 2025 must be transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will make the world a safer and more stable place,” he added.

The year 2024 is expected to end with a global average temperature at least 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus.

However, a permanent breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius limit specified in the Paris Agreement refers to long-term warming over a 20- or 30-year period.

That said, experts feel that the world is now entering a phase where temperatures will be consistently above this threshold.

The average global temperature has already risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius compared to the 1850-1900 average, driven by the rapid buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change, says global emissions must peak by 2025 and reduce by 43 per cent by 2030 and 57 per cent by 2035 compared to 2019 levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, according to the latest UN data, current policies will take global warming to around 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Even the full implementation of all Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) or national climate plans will likely lead to just a 5.9 per cent emission reduction by 2030 compared to 2019 levels, according to the synthesis report of countries’ NDCs.

Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are the largest contributors to climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions.

However, the world is struggling to transition away from fossil fuels rapidly enough to prevent breaching the 1.5-degree Celsius goal due to a combination of political, economic, technological, and social challenges.

The transition to clean energy sources is particularly difficult for poor countries in the Global South due to dependence on fossil fuels for jobs and cheap energy, lack of funding and technology, weak power grids, and limited expertise.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

United Nations:

Humanity is suffering from an “extreme heat epidemic,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Thursday, calling for action to limit the impacts of heat waves intensified by climate change.

“Billions of people are facing an extreme heat epidemic — wilting under increasingly deadly heat waves, with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius around the world,” he said. “That’s 122 degrees Fahrenheit. And halfway to boiling.”

According to the European Copernicus network, July 21, 22 and 23 were the three hottest days ever recorded worldwide, with July 22 holding the absolute record of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

Guterres repeated his call for humanity to fight its “addiction” to fossil fuels.

“Today, our focus is on the impact of extreme heat. But let’s not forget that there are many other devastating symptoms of the climate crisis: ever-more fierce hurricanes. Floods. Droughts. Wildfires. Rising sea levels. And the list goes on,” he said.

“To tackle all these symptoms, we need to fight the disease. And the disease is the madness of incinerating our only home. The disease is the addiction to fossil fuels. The disease is climate inaction,” he stressed, calling in particular on G20 countries to take action.

While 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 could set a new record, temperatures well above 40C (104F) are increasingly common.

In the space of a year, the 50C threshold has even been exceeded in at least 10 places, from Death Valley in the United States (53.9C on July 7) to Agadir in Morocco, and also in China and India.

The intense heat, often less visible than other devastating impacts of climate change such as storms or floods, is nonetheless more deadly.

This “silent killer” is responsible for around 489,000 deaths per year between 2000 and 2019, compared with 16,000 deaths per year from cyclones, according to the UN’s “Call to Action” document published on Thursday.

Workers exposed

Extremely high temperatures also have an economic impact, with the UN estimating economic losses from heat stress at work will reach $2.4 trillion in 2030.

According to a report by the International Labor Organization published on Thursday, more than 70 percent of workers were exposed to excessive heat in 2020, 8.8 percent more than in 2000.

“The good news is that we can save lives and we can limit its impact,” Guterres said Thursday.

The UN has called for the world community to first act to protect “the most vulnerable” — including young children, the elderly and also humanity’s poorest.

In this context, early warning systems should include extreme heat, warning populations of the arrival of heat waves and informing them of the precautions to take, the document says.

The call to action also recommends an “increase (to) equitable access to and scale up (of) low-carbon cooling.”

This would involve investing in passive cooling systems — which include climate-sensitive urban design measures, reflective surfaces and natural cooling systems — and the phase-out of climate-warming gases that are used in many cooling systems.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Labourers sleep on the roadside during an early hot summer morning in Karachi, Pakistan. Pakistan port city Karachi and some other parts of the country continued to experience heatwave these days. File
| Photo Credit: AP

The world experienced an average of 26 more days of extreme heat over the last 12 months that would probably not have occurred without climate change, a report said on May 28.

Heat is the leading cause of climate-related death and the report further points to the role of global warming in increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

For this study, scientists used the years 1991 to 2020 to determine what temperatures counted as within the top 10 per cent for each country over that period.

Next, they looked at the 12 months to May 15, 2024, to establish how many days over that period experienced temperatures within — or beyond — the previous range.

Then, using peer-reviewed methods, they examined the influence of climate change on each of these excessively hot days.

They concluded that “human-caused climate change added — on average, across all places in the world — 26 more days of extreme heat than there would have been without it”.

The report was published by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the World Weather Attribution scientific network and the nonprofit research organisation Climate Central.

2023 was the hottest year on record, according to the European Union’s climate monitor, Copernicus.

Already this year, extreme heatwaves have afflicted swathes of the globe from Mexico to Pakistan.

The report said that in the last 12 months, some 6.3 billion people — roughly 80% of the global population — experienced at least 31 days of what is classed as extreme heat.

In total, 76 extreme heatwaves were registered in 90 different countries on every continent except Antarctica.

Five of the most affected nations were in Latin America.

The report said that without the influence of climate change, Suriname would have recorded an estimated 24 extreme heat days instead of 182; Ecuador 10 not 180; Guyana 33 not 174, El Salvador 15 not 163; and Panama 12 not 149.

“[Extreme heat] is known to have killed tens of thousands of people over the last 12 months but the real number is likely in the hundreds of thousands or even millions,” the Red Cross said in a statement.

“Flooding and hurricanes may capture the headlines but the impacts of extreme heat are equally deadly,” said Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of the Red Cross.