Research Group Pins Blame For Big 2024 Global Weather Disasters On Climate Change

The organization World Weather Attribution blames
many of the world's worst weather disasters of 2024
largely on climate change. 

 A research group says that many of the most extreme weather disasters of 2024 were made worse than they otherwise would have due to climate change. 

The group World Weather Attribution issued their 2024 summary on December 27.

Key findings include:

-- Climate change contributed to the deaths of at least 3,700 people the displacement of 26 weather events the group studies in 2024.  They explain: "These were just a small fraction of the 219 events that met our trigger criteria, used to identify the most impactful weather events. It's like the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands."

--Globally, climate change added on average 41 additional days of dangerous heat in 2024 that threatened people's health. The countries the had the most dangerous heat days in 2024 were mostly small islands and developing states that don't have the infrastructure to protect people from the heat. 

---Although many of 2024's extreme events were in part influence by El Nino, especially in the early part of the year, in most cases climate change played a larger role than El Nino in making these individual problems - such as a huge drought in the Amazon - worse. 

--- Of 16 floods WWA studied, 15 were driven by rainfall amplified by climate change. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leasing to heavier downpours. Some of the floods had huge death tolls due to shortcomings in storm warnings and evacuation plans. 

--- Warmer seas in general strengthen tropical cyclones. Thirty of 38 Atlantic hurricanes between 2019 and 2023 were made noticeably stronger than they otherwise would have been without climate change. That climate change is also increasing the risk of the Philippines being hit be strong typhoons.

An example not mentioned in the WWA report is the fact that in November, the Philippines were hit by four powerful typhoons within ten days. 

World Weather Attribution works with scientists to quantify how climate change influences to the intensity and likelihood of extreme weather events. They do so, usually immediately after an extreme event using weather observations and computer modeling.  The organization also evaluates how existing vulnerabilities worse the impacts of those extreme weather events. 

WWA tries to make their analyses public as soon as they become available, very often days or weeks after the event.  

That's good, since these events are still hot topics in the media not long after they occur. If these reports are made public months or years after these disasters, the publics minds will have long since moved on to the next topic. 

In their end of year report, WWA had a few "New Year's resolutions" to pass on. Those include efforts to accelerate shifts away from fossil fuel use, improvements in warning procedures around the world to get people out of the way of sudden disasters, and more real-time reporting of heat deaths since this problem is underreported.