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 as heat across the globe made and a slew of other fatal weather events spared few.
鈥淭he 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,鈥� Friederike Otto, the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist, said during a media briefing on the scientists' findings. 鈥淎s long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse.鈥�
Millions of people endured stifling heat this year. and baked. Sizzling daytime temperatures scorched . Heat endangered already . Skyrocketing southern European temperatures . In , heat forced school closures. Earth experienced and its , with a that just barely broke.
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. The results are not yet peer-reviewed, but researchers use peer-reviewed methods.
Some areas saw 150 days or more of extreme heat due to climate change.
鈥淭he poorest, least developed countries on the planet are the places that are experiencing even higher numbers,鈥� said Kristina Dahl, vice president of climate science at Climate Central.
What's worse, are often .
鈥淧eople don鈥檛 have to die in heat waves. But if we can鈥檛 communicate convincingly, 鈥榖ut actually a lot of people are dying,鈥� it鈥檚 much harder to raise this awareness,鈥� Otto said. 鈥淗eat waves are by far the deadliest extreme event, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.鈥�
This year was a warning that the planet is getting dangerously close to the Paris Agreement鈥檚 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit compared to the pre-industrial average, according to the scientists. Earth is expected to soon edge past that threshold, although it's 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 , 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 2024's events. Warm ocean waters and warmer air fueled more destructive storms, according to the researchers, while temperatures led to many record-breaking downpours.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Cape Cod who wasn鈥檛 involved in the research, said the science and findings were sound.
鈥淓xtreme 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.
climate extremes could be expected without action, the United Nations Environment Programme said in the fall, as than last year.
But the deaths and damages from extreme weather events aren't inevitable, said Julie Arrighi, director of programmes at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and part of the research.
鈥淐ountries 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.
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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. Follow her on X: . Reach her at [email protected].
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Alexa St. John, The Associated Press
