New Delhi:
The world will experience 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 will end as the hottest year on record and the first year with a global average temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
An annual overview report from two groups of climate scientists – World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central – shows that the world will see an average of 41 more days of dangerous heat in 2024.
Small Island Developing States were the hardest hit; their inhabitants received more than 130 extra warm 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 millions of displaced people in 26 extreme weather events.
“It is likely that the total number of people killed this year in extreme weather events intensified by climate change is in the tens or hundreds of thousands this year,” the report said.
The floods in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad were the deadliest event studied by the group, killing at least 2,000 people.
The study found that if global warming reached two degrees Celsius, which could happen as early as the 2040s or 2050s, these regions could experience similarly heavy rainfall every year.
Friederike Otto, head of WWA and senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said: “The consequences of global warming from fossil fuels have never been more apparent or devastating than in 2024. We are living in a dangerous new era. ” “We know exactly what we need to do to prevent the situation from getting worse – stop burning fossil fuels. The top resolution for 2025 must be the transition away from fossil fuels, which will make the world a safer and more stable place,” he added. .
According to Copernicus, the year 2024 is expected to end with a global average temperature at least 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
However, a permanent exceedance of the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit set in the Paris Agreement refers to long-term warming over a period of 20 to 30 years.
That said, experts believe the world is now entering a phase where temperatures will consistently be above this threshold.
Earth’s average temperature has already risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius compared to the 1850-1900 average, due to the rapid build-up of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that assesses the science on climate change, says global emissions should peak in 2025 and fall by 43 percent from levels by 2030 and 57 percent by 2035 of 2019 to limit global warming to 1.5 percent. degrees Celsius.
However, current policies will reduce global warming to around 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the latest UN data.
Even full implementation of all Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) or national climate plans will likely lead to an emissions reduction of only 5.9 percent in 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, responsible for more than 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions.
However, the world is struggling to transition away from fossil fuels quickly enough to avoid exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, 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 South due to dependence on fossil fuels for jobs and cheap energy, lack of financing and technology, weak electricity grids and limited expertise.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)