A Year on Planet Earth — Part 2
It really has been a drama-filled year for our home planet.
With relentless, record-setting global heating, rampaging wildfires, and extreme storms, we’ve had ample reason to be seriously concerned about the future. But other events, have amazed us with great beauty and displays of creative energy. Among them were awesome volcanic eruptions of lava in Iceland and Hawaii, as well as mind-boggling eruptions of plasma from the Sun that caused dazzling displays of the Northern Lights.
During 2024, I’ve tried to keep pace with these events by using compelling imagery to tell their stories. Now, at year’s end, I thought it would be revealing to do a recap featuring some of that imagery in a three-part series. Please check out the first part here. In Part 1, I document events from early in the year through the spring. Here, I take things through the fall. And you can find the third part here.
So, without further ado, on to Part 2:
The Heat Goes On. And On. And…
Here’s how daily global surface temperatures have changed since the 1940s. The months of June through September show up warmer than others because this is the warm season in the Northern Hemisphere, which has a higher proportion land than the Southern Hemisphere. Also note that in addition to the obvious overall heating, the warm season has expanded. (Credit: Zeke Hausfather via Bluesky Social)
Just yesterday (I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve), the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2024 is set to be the warmest year in records dating back to the 1800s. This means a heat-streak of record-setting years has gone on for a decade.
“The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a New Year message.
A landscape desiccated by heat and lack of water. (Credit: World Meteorological Organization.)
The heating of Earth’s climatic life-support system has been caused by our emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which reached a record high in 2024. The continued increase in emissions from our industries, motor vehicles, worsening wildfires, and other sources, has caused carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere not only to continue rising, but to do so at an increasing rate — as this graph demonstrates:
The annual mean growth rates for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii is shown here. (Blue bars.) In the graph, decadal averages of the growth rate are also plotted, as horizontal lines for 1960 through 1969, 1970 through 1979, and so on. (Credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory)
The global heating cause by the greenhouse gases we continue to pump into the atmosphere is having multiple, intensifying climate impacts.
According to a new report from World Weather Attribution, issued in collaboration with Climate Central, in 2024 climate change intensified 26 of 29 weather events examined by the researchers. “It’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands,” the report concluded.
Globally, climate change added on average 41 additional days of dangerous heat in 2024 — heat severe enough that it threatened people’s health.
The record-breaking heat of 2024 helped generate record-breaking downpours. “From Kathmandu, to Dubai, to Rio Grande do Sul, to the Southern Appalachians, the last 12 months have been marked by a large number of devastating floods,” the World Weather Attribution report found. “Of the 16 floods we studied, 15 were driven by climate change-amplified rainfall.”
The researchers also found that hot seas and warmer air helped provide the fuel for more destructive storms — among them, Hurricane Helene, which I’ll feature in Part 3 of this series.
And there were also devastating, fast-moving wildfires.
An “Exceptional Year” of Wildfire Activity in the Americas
Smoke from wildfires in Canada as well as the United States blankets about 1.5 million square miles, as seen in this image acquired by the GOES-18 satellite on July 19, 2024.
Hot and dry conditions primed the Americas this past year for what the European Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service described in a recent report as “exceptional” wildfire activity.
“The scale of some of the fires were at historical levels, especially in Bolivia, the Pantanal and parts of the Amazon, and Canadian wildfires were again extreme, although not at the scale of 2023,” said Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist at the monitoring service. The fires had “continental-scale impacts on air quality with high surface concentrations of particulate matter and other pollutants which persisted for several weeks.”
You can see an example of such “continental-scale impacts” in the satellite image above, showing wildfire smoke from Canadian blazes spreading across thousands of miles of North America.
Overall, increasing heat, extended droughts, and a thirstier atmosphere are intensifying and lengthening fire seasons in some regions of the world. This has been especially true of the Western United States, which has been seeing significantly increasing wildfire risk and extent during the last two decades.
“Some of the most deadly and destructive wildfires in U.S. history have occurred in recent years, with most having the common characteristic of extremely rapid growth,” write the authors of a recent study on fast-growing wildfires led by University of Colorado scientist Jennifer Balch. (Note: Balch is a colleague of mine at the University of Colorado, where I direct the Center for Environmental Journalism.)
The sprawling, angry scar from California’s Park Fire is seen in this Landsat satellite image acquired on Aug. 4, 2024. Note the Northern California City of Chico, population 101,301, in the lower part of the 40-mile-wide image. (Credit: Landsat data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, processed by Pierre Markuse.)
We saw that play this past year with a number of vicious wildfires. “For example, in July, the Park wildfire in northern California spread to more than 50,000 hectares in its first 24 hours — the equivalent of around one football field per second,” Balch and her colleagues write.
The area burned by wildfires in the West each year is now ten times greater than four decades ago, thanks in part to faster spreading flames, their study shows. The year 2020 saw the most area burned so far — 3.3 million hectares, which is larger than Belgium. If the region continues getting warmer and drier still, as is expected, it’s likely that this record will be surpassed in just 5 to 10 years, Balch and a colleague, A. Park Williams, write in a commentary accompanying their research paper.
There are many ways for us to be more resilient in the face of wildfire risks, they say. Some examples: careful application of prescribed burning to thin out fuels; managing ecosystems more wisely to prepare for future ecological changes; more robust collection of data on wildfires along with better modeling to help us prepare for and manage blazes that are going to continue coming; and being wiser about where we build and how we build.
“Individual disasters attract attention, and rightly so, but the focus should be on how to coexist with fire — not simply how best to battle it,” Balch and Williams conclude.
Please check out the third installment of this series here.