Our planet still seems unable to overcome the heat.
Last month was the hottest August on record. The “heat wave” Words used The usually calm National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regularly publishes a summary of its survey results. Monthly Analysis.
And August wasn’t the only one. NASA’s Independent calculationLast month was the warmest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere since world records began in the 1800s. It also extended Earth’s heat record to 15 consecutive months of record-breaking global temperatures.
This bar graph shows how global summer temperatures differed from the long-term average in 2023 (yellow) and 2024 (red). (The white line shows the estimated temperature range.) This warmer-than-usual summer continues a long-term warming trend driven largely by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. (Source: NASA/Peter Jacobs)
According to NASA, the Northern Hemisphere’s meteorological summer of 2024—June, July, and August—was 2.25 degrees F (1.25 degrees C) warmer than the average summer from 1951 to 1980. August alone was 2.34 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) warmer than average. Most concerning is that the heat is continuing despite the warming effects of a strong El Niño in 2023 and 2024 fading away.
“Data from multiple archives show that while the warming of the past two years may have been intense, it is significantly higher than anything seen in the previous several years, including a strong El Niño event,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “This is a clear indicator of ongoing climate warming due to human activities.”
Based on what we’ve already seen this year, there’s a very good chance that 2024 will be the warmest year on record.” Schmidt recently predicted that.
One of the effects of the massive warming is likely to be felt in the western United States, where several large wildfires are raging. Southern California has been hit particularly hard, with three fierce fires burning more than 100,000 acres in a short period of time.
This time-lapse video of the Line Fire near San Bernardino shows the severity of what’s happening.
Since 1980, California has experienced a significant long-term trend toward warmer temperatures and drier air. These conditions, of course, are conducive to wildfires. In fact, studies have shown that wildfires have consumed more and more of the Golden State in recent decades, due to climate impacts. For example, study A study published last year found that the area burned by fires increased by 320% from 1996 to 2021, and almost all of that increase was due to human-caused climate change.
Amazing Mystery
Scientists are turning their attention to the planet and wondering why the heat is so persistent.
“Unfortunately, we still lack a good explanation for what drove the exceptional warming the world experienced in 2023 and 2024,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. He wrote in the Climate Brink newsletter: Scientists have considered a number of “potential mundane explanations,” including volcanic eruptions, changes in solar activity, and the strange behavior of El Niño. “But these are only being modeled to a greater extent, and even when all these estimates are combined, it is difficult to explain the magnitude of the global temperature anomaly the world has experienced.”
Moreover, El Niño phenomenon has disappeared and La Niña phenomenon, which is a cooling phenomenon, has also disappeared. CameThe record-breaking heat shows no sign of abating, disappointing expectations.
This graph shows estimates of daily surface temperatures around the world from 1984 to September 9, 2024. Temperatures since September 1 this year have been warmer or nearly warmer than the same time last year, when daily records were being set. (Source: Climatereanalyzer.org)
The mystery of what’s happening has alarmed some scientists. If global temperatures have been moderating, it would suggest that the record heatwave was “a temporary change, a short-term internal fluctuation that drove the global temperature spike but didn’t last,” Hausfather says.
While there is some scientific debate about this, a “blip” is looking less and less likely. Even now, temperatures are at or near record highs in September. That means “it’s becoming less and less likely that last year’s high temperatures were mostly a blip,” Hausfather says.
This could mean that positive feedbacks (warmth triggering changes that promote more warmth) “could promote higher global temperatures in the future.”
Given the ongoing mystery and the possibility that we have entered a dangerous, self-reinforcing climate regime, it would be forgiven to feel a sense of doom. But Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Climate Research Center at Texas A&M University, says we must resist despair. proverb From his newsletter: “Please don’t feel this way!”
Causes of optimism
Dessler cites two facts that keep him grounded. The first is that the climate will stop warming as soon as humans stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And if that seems like a distant possibility, he also says that the technology needed to largely stop emissions in the coming decades is already available.
In fact, it’s already helping a lot.
“We are in the midst of a legitimate, once-in-a-lifetime energy revolution,” Dessler said. “The last revolution was 150 years ago, when the fossil fuel era began. Today, we are moving from an energy system based on burning trash to one that generates electricity directly from renewable sources.”
As I did Recent WritingsCO2 emissions in the U.S. and other developed countries fell 4.5% last year. The world has never seen such a significant decline outside of recessions. And this happened even as gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 1.7%.
This shows that Dessler is right: we know for sure how to reduce emissions, and we have already started doing so.
But to avoid a hotter and more destructive year than the one we’ve lived through, advanced economies must accelerate the transition away from “burning waste” and toward zero-carbon renewable energy sources—and help other countries do the same.
We all need to work together to solve this problem. It’s time to complete the energy revolution that is already underway before it’s too late.
