At the end of the first year in which global average temperatures are almost certain to top the key threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial times, scientists have sounded the alarm about the extremes of climate and weather we’re already experiencing – and are warning things could get even more serious.
At the same time, they say it’s not too late both to limit the damage by phasing out planet-heating fossil fuels and doing more to protect communities from the dangers of worsening heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms.
After Cyclone Chido, France accused of neglecting climate threat to “fragile” Mayotte
In a report outlining their findings for 2024, researchers collaborating with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central projects said climate change had intensified 26 of the 29 weather events they studied during the year.
Those disasters killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions – but are only a small sample of what was experienced on the frontlines of a warming world. They included severe floods in eastern Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in South America’s Amazon rainforest, and flooding across West and Central Africa.
Source: “When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024” report from World Weather Attribution & Climate Central
The scientists also found that people around the world experienced, on average, 41 extra days of dangerous heat in 2024 due to human-caused warming.
Friederike Otto, WWA’s lead and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said the “unrelenting suffering” could be alleviated if we stop burning coal, oil and gas, use renewable energy to power our economies instead, and adapt to climate impacts.
“The top resolution for 2025 must be transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will make the world a safer and more stable place,” she said in a statement.
Here are some key facts and figures from the report:
Heat: Too hot to handle
2024 is set to be the hottest year on record – again. The first six months saw record-breaking temperatures, extending a streak started in 2023 to 13 months. The world’s hottest day in history was recorded on July 22, while a day earlier more than 5 billion people were exposed to high temperatures made at least two times more likely due to climate change.
However, the scientists note that surpassing global warming of 1.5C for a one-year period, as expected for 2024, does not mean the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting it to that level has failed, because that would require several years with temperatures above 1.5C. “However, it is a warning that we are getting dangerously close,” the report said.
The El Niño climate phenomenon, caused by warmer temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, added some heat in the first half of this year, but rising emissions were the main culprit for so many record-shattering temperatures, it added.
The countries with the highest number of risky heat days were largely small island developing states (SIDS), accounting for 18 out of the top 20. Their residents – also threatened by rising sea levels and powerful storms – experienced more than 130 additional days of dangerous heat in 2024. SIDS, many of them highly indebted, pushed for more financial support for vulnerable countries at COP29 and were disappointed with the outcome.
Flooding: Be warned
The high heat levels of 2024 also translated into record-breaking downpours, as warmer air holds more moisture and hotter seas cause increased evaporation. As a result, devastating floods hit many places worldwide, from Dubai to Kathmandu and Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul.
The scientists said their work this year highlighted how early warning – and acting on it – often makes the difference between life and death.
In September, for example, four days of record rainfall brought by Storm Boris flooded regions of Central Europe, but people were evacuated days in advance, reservoirs were drained and flood defences built up, meaning that less than 30 people lost their lives.
Source: “When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024” report from World Weather Attribution & Climate Central
Meanwhile, floods in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad were the deadliest event studied by WWA in 2024, with at least 2,000 people killed and millions displaced. The group found that if warming reaches 2C, which could happen as soon as the 2040s or 2050s, those regions could experience similar periods of heavy rainfall every year.
“Our studies continue to show the need to enhance preparedness for extreme weather to reduce loss of life and damages,” said Julie Arrighi, director of programmes at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “In 2025, it’s crucial that every country accelerate efforts to adapt to climate change.”
Storms: Blown away
Scientists said that as the world and its oceans warm, a bigger share of the most powerful tropical cyclones are reaching category 3 or above (5 being the highest), with faster maximum wind speeds, heavier rainfall and much greater destructive potential.
Other shifts in tropical cyclones include storms strengthening faster, migrating towards the poles and moving more slowly over land, often leading to more severe impacts.
This year the typhoon-prone Philippines was hit by six consecutive storms in just a few weeks from mid-October to mid-November – including three classed as “super typhoons” – affecting 13 million people and killing more than 160. The likelihood of three or more major typhoons making landfall in the Philippines in a given year has increased by about 25% due to human-induced climate change, WWA said.
Source: “When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024” report from World Weather Attribution & Climate Central
Also this year, Hurricane Helene killed more than 230 people after extreme rainfall affected communities in the southern Appalachians, making it the deadliest hurricane to strike the mainland United States since Katrina in 2005.
Drought and wildfires: Drier – and more flammable
Rising temperatures make droughts worse by increasing water loss from soils through evaporation and plant transpiration.
In 2024, the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia suffered severe droughts that led to water rationing and huge losses of wheat crops. They were made 50% more likely by climate change, WWA’s study found.
As Earth dries out, countries fail to reach drought agreement
Persistent heat also intensified the devastating drought in the Amazon River Basin this year, provoking concerns about tree dieback in the world’s largest rainforest, which could release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming.
Regina Rodrigues, professor of physical oceanography and climate at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina, said worsening droughts might push the Amazon forest irreversibly into a drier state, reducing its moisture flow and ability to absorb and store carbon, as well as its biodiversity.
“All these critical processes are essential not only locally and regionally but also globally in order to maintain life as we know it. We are already witnessing some of these devastating consequences,” she warned.
Source: “When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024” report from World Weather Attribution & Climate Central
One study published in Nature by an international team this year warned that parts of the Amazon may have already passed a safe boundary, and as much as half of the rainforest could hit this tipping point by 2050 unless deforestation – which harms the forest’s ability to hold water – is halted.
Hot and dry conditions also mean that if fires ignite in forests, the chances of the blazes spreading are much higher and they are far harder to control.
2024 was an extremely active year for wildfires, particularly in the Americas – from Chile and Brazil’s drought-hit Pantanal wetland to western Canada and the United States.
The report said smoke from the fires in North America impacted air quality across the region and as far away as Europe, with recent research suggesting the number of people dying due to inhaling smoke from wildfires is rising due to global heating.
(Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Mariel Lozada)
The post 2024: A year of extreme heat and growing climate danger appeared first on Climate Home News.
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
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The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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