More Than 150 'Unprecedented' Climate Disasters Struck World in 2024, Says UN (theguardian.com) 68
The devastating impacts of the climate crisis reached new heights in 2024, with scores of unprecedented heatwaves, floods and storms across the globe, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organization. From a report: The WMO's report on 2024, the hottest year on record, sets out a trail of destruction from extreme weather that took lives, demolished buildings and ravaged vital crops. More than 800,000 people were displaced and made homeless, the highest yearly number since records began in 2008.
The report lists 151 unprecedented extreme weather events in 2024, meaning they were worse than any ever recorded in the region. Heatwaves in Japan left hundreds of thousands of people struck down by heatstroke. Soaring temperatures during heatwaves peaked at 49.9C at Carnarvon in Western Australia, 49.7C in the city of Tabas in Iran, and 48.5C in a nationwide heatwave in Mali.
Record rains in Italy led to floods, landslides and electricity blackouts; torrents destroyed thousands of homes in Senegal; and flash floods in Pakistan and Brazil caused major crop losses.
Storms were also supercharged by global heating in 2024, with an unprecedented six typhoons in under a month hitting the Philippines. Hurricane Helene was the strongest ever recorded to strike the Big Bend region of Florida in the US, while Vietnam was hit by Super Typhoon Yagi, affecting 3.6 million people. Many more unprecedented events will have passed unrecorded.
The report lists 151 unprecedented extreme weather events in 2024, meaning they were worse than any ever recorded in the region. Heatwaves in Japan left hundreds of thousands of people struck down by heatstroke. Soaring temperatures during heatwaves peaked at 49.9C at Carnarvon in Western Australia, 49.7C in the city of Tabas in Iran, and 48.5C in a nationwide heatwave in Mali.
Record rains in Italy led to floods, landslides and electricity blackouts; torrents destroyed thousands of homes in Senegal; and flash floods in Pakistan and Brazil caused major crop losses.
Storms were also supercharged by global heating in 2024, with an unprecedented six typhoons in under a month hitting the Philippines. Hurricane Helene was the strongest ever recorded to strike the Big Bend region of Florida in the US, while Vietnam was hit by Super Typhoon Yagi, affecting 3.6 million people. Many more unprecedented events will have passed unrecorded.
Disasters of Biblical Proportions! (Score:5, Funny)
Real wrath of God type stuff: fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, and seas boiling, 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Sorry, couldn't resist ...
Re: (Score:2)
I love that rant. A long time buddy of mine and I use the "...dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!" part of the line with each other still to this day.
Re: (Score:2)
Who is profiting? I want names.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Who is profiting? I want names.
You really think you're going to get a coherent answer to that? At best, you will just get some idiot yelling about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Who is profiting? I want names.
Start with the Fortune 100. End with your own gross insurance costs.
You act as if it’s hard to find the Disease of Greed. You are part of the race infected by it.
(Humans aren’t even smart enough to avoid repeating the worst of our own history, so no. No one’s looking for a cure.)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Here you go [yahoo.com], specific names and their salaries.
Re: And each one was very profitable (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Learn the difference between what you wish to be and what is.
Not unprecedented (Score:5, Informative)
All but 15 of the 152 are "heat wave". I picked one of the heat waves at random... Japan..
"The seasonal anomaly of the average temperature over Japan was +1.76ÂC in summer (June - August), tied with 2023 as the warmest for the season since 1898. It was +1.97ÂC in autumn (September - November), setting the warmest for the season since 1898. "
So actual Summer heat is tied with 2023... already not unprecedented. Autumn temps count as a "heat wave" not because of scorching unbearable heat but because the average during Fall time is higher than the average since records began for Fall time. This does not comport to common public understanding of what heat wave means.
There is enough actual credible evidence of global warming / climate change. There is no need to pile on... all this does is piss away your credibility and integrity and by extension the credibility of the overall cause for nothing.
Every disaster a climate disaster (Score:2)
We need more climate disasters!
Re:Every disaster a climate disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we do. We should see the peaches of Georgia shrivel on the limb from excessive heat and no rain, the wheat fields of Kansas and Nebraska shrivel and die in a dust bowl, the shrimp farmers in Louisiana come up empty, and the corn fields of Illinois have stubs so we can spend more taxpayer money propping up farmers for an issue we've been told about but keep claiming doesn't exist.
This is the literal example of an admin telling the higher ups about a security issue, but which is ignored, until the security issue becomes a breach, at which point the higher ups will look around and ask why no one told them while they're spending five times the amount to mitigate the issue compared to them having addressed the issue.
Re: (Score:2)
There is an obvious solution, and that is to produce less, and stop the constant economic growth for the sake of economic growth. But every side of the political spectrum won't accept that. Just look at cry's of doom and gloom when the stock market goes down, and that's just rich people thinking that the economy might get worse. The problem is we want a solution without loosing anything, well that's probably not going to happen until its forced upon us.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Every disaster a climate disaster (Score:3)
The quest for constant economic growth does seem to be a borderline religion amongst economists these days without explaining why constantly buying ever more crap that eventually ends up in landfill is the only economic model that should be followed.
Re: (Score:2)
without explaining why constantly buying ever more crap that eventually ends up in landfill is the only economic model that should be followed.
Thats not true, how would bitcoin wind up in a landfil.. No, wait there was that one guy who’s now trying to buy the landfill because of the discarded bitcoin. Carry on.
Re: Every disaster a climate disaster (Score:3)
This is the literal example of an admin telling the higher ups about a security issue, but which is ignored, until the security issue becomes a breach, at which point the higher ups will look around and ask why no one told them while they're spending five times the amount to mitigate the issue compared to them having addressed the issue.
I get your analogy, but I think there are many instances with climate change that are more akin to having your network compromised and causing more problems to others than to yourself.
Re: (Score:1)
Because mature chickens will lay an egg per day while a mature turkey will lay an egg per week. Simply, we get more eggs from chickens than other species. I suspect that selective breeding had something to do with getting chickens that lay more eggs and that if we wanted then we might be able to get some equivalent amount of eggs from turkeys. But why would we want to? We have productive chickens now and getting similarly productive turkeys could take years. If this shortage of eggs dragged on long eno
Re: (Score:2)
Burgers and Beer (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you have clean selenium free water. Between the vanishing glaciers and the new coal mines, that clean water is not a given.
Re: (Score:2)
I know it's in fashion to downplay it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's fun to downplay each weather event as unimportant and not at all related to climate, but I live in an area where 50-60 mph wind gusts were a rare, maybe twice a year brief occurrence, and where it's now a bi-weekly event. Storms are more powerful and more frequent. How many of these events does it take for the "there is no climate change" folks to realize, uh, weather trends that continue to change year over year for decades on end actually does sorta lead us to conclude that there is actually climate change? If it were isolated to only us, and nowhere else was seeing any of these changes, I'd probably feel differently about it, but I don't think shoving our fingers in our ears and screaming it's not real is doing us a lot of good.
Do I think some people have turned climate change into profitable industry to a sickening degree? Yes, absolutely, and they should be called out for it. But I also think it's something very real that we should address. Just because we have a scam based economy right now doesn't mean that every scammer isn't started with a kernel of truth to build their scam. Ever great scam starts with a kernel of reality, then spins the web of lies on top of it.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
How about:
"Do I think some people have turned climate change denial into profitable industry to a sickening degree?"
Hell, Mr. "Drill Baby Drill" Trump got elected President of the USA on a platform including climate denial.
Re: (Score:2)
How about: "Do I think some people have turned climate change denial into profitable industry to a sickening degree?" Hell, Mr. "Drill Baby Drill" Trump got elected President of the USA on a platform including climate denial.
Is this meant as some sort of dig against my point? There are for-profit industrialists using climate change for profit. There's also an alarming amount of climate change denialism. Those two things are both true.
One thing we can say about American society? It's scams built on denialism all the way down.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I know it's in fashion to downplay it all. (Score:4, Interesting)
Then I made snow angels in Austin fucking Texas in 2021 when it was 14 F.
Climate shit is really broken because of jetstream stability damage due to a massive amount of increased net absorbed energy in the Arctic Sea region due to temperature rise. Anyone denying reality now and not making it a priority is either a moron or profiteering from it.
Re: (Score:1)
Anyone denying reality now and not making it a priority is either a moron or profiteering from it.
I believe those refusing to allow nuclear fission as a source of energy are the largest deniers of global warming. If global warming is such a threat then how can nuclear fission be a greater threat? We have data showing nuclear fission to be an exceedingly safe and very low emitter of CO2: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
If nuclear fission for energy is a greater threat than global warming then how much of a threat can global warming be?
There's claims that nuclear power is somehow a stepping stone to nu
weather records (Score:2)
So can you point me to the weather records (ideally max windspeed each day ) for the last few decades for your area. That really seems quite an incredible (literally) change, and would be well worth studying. or let me guess, crickets.
Re: (Score:2)
So can you point me to the weather records (ideally max windspeed each day ) for the last few decades for your area. That really seems quite an incredible (literally) change, and would be well worth studying. or let me guess, crickets.
Having lived it, I don't have records off-hand. You can poke around the national weather service for Sioux Falls or South Dakota, where you can literally scroll through individual days, or individual years, and get "average wind speeds," but I'm honestly having trouble finding recorded "highest gust speeds by year" or anything resembling it. I'll do more poking around and see if I can come up with some satisfactory reply for your attempted "gotcthya, liar" response to my lived experience.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.wunderground.com/h... [wunderground.com]
seems to be about the best resource for max windspeeds each day. Sadly I can't download the historical time series.
So What? (Score:5, Insightful)
These reports are all pretty pointless. We know global warming is happening and the consequences are catastrophic. The question is what are we doing about it.
The answer is research for clickbait to feed the narrative about the disastrous consequences. There is already too much emissions in the atmosphere. We have spent the last ten or twenty years talking about the problem while putting increasingly more emissions into the atmosphere each year. We need to reduce the emissions in the atmosphere and progress is considered slowing the rate at which we annually increase the amount of new emissions.
In short, we aren't going to do anything other than talk about the problem and create intellectually interesting solutions that don't even begin to address the problem. A candle started the house on fire, so we are talking about buying a candle snuffer.
Re: (Score:2)
As long as money is involved, there will be debate until the last two humans are drowning on what to do about this.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And outright denial.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry, November 5, 2024 came up with a fix...
Since January 20, 2025, I have seen nothing but breakage. What fix are you expecting?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Full ecological collapse of entire breadbasket regions would be different. Entire populations of farmers losing their livelihoods.
Super-hurricanes that wreck entire cities. A slightly-bigger hurricane that causes 10s of billions of damage won’t cut it. That’s just slightly-worse weather. They’ll just blame Biden.
Heat waves that last long enough to soften the high
Re: (Score:1)
These reports are all pretty pointless. We know global warming is happening and the consequences are catastrophic. The question is what are we doing about it.
What we are going to do about it is more nuclear fission and natural gas to replace coal and petroleum. In addition to that the federal government is ending subsidies on expensive energy sources like offshore wind and rooftop solar. Onshore wind is low cost, low tech (meaning it is a technology that can be implemented quickly), low in CO2 emissions, and quite safe for people and the environment when sited appropriately. Fixed axis PV close to the ground, and on otherwise unproductive land, can be viable
Republicans Have Climate Delusions (Score:2)
Look at the photomap of Silicon Valley. It's gray from roads and buildings: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qFctJs... [app.goo.gl]
More misleading politics from The Guardian (Score:3, Insightful)
"unprecedented" in this context (climate related stuff) is largely meaningless and even more mushy than the usual claim of "record breaking". When they say "record breaking" what they're really saying is "humans have not written such a thing down within the past 300 years [out of the past 6 billion years]." which is a statistically meaningless claim. Humans have only had a planetary view of weather/climate since we started flying weather satellites (less than 70 years, and those early ones only provided gray-scale images NOT temps, seal levels, wind speeds, atmospheric content measurements, etc). Data from before that is a century of weather observations from airports and cities around the world, and before that it's several centuries of amateur observations in cities and on ships at sea with instruments lacking common calibration. Before that, it gets to tree rings, ice , and mud all with ZERO possibility of actual calibration at all. This form of "record breaking" or the less certain "unprecedented" claim is quite nonsensical when applied to whether government policies are needed to be applied to change the climate by tenths of a degree (when none of the weather observations from over a century ago were even MADE with devices having tenths of a degree of accuracy. Certainly no tree ring or ice core has a calibrated accuracy of tenths or hundredths of a degree.
This left wing political rag runs stories like this rather frequently - Chicken Little "the sky is falling!" articles are both great as click bait, and they feed the audience for the publication more of what they already believe.
Re: (Score:1)
Huh? (Score:2)
Is somebody denying the existence of a climate in 2025?
An actual intelligent discussion involves the exchange of ideas, which some of you guys seem unable to do. Jingoism and sloganeering teamed-up with name calling is no substitute for intelligent dialog.
Let me give you a start:
Please explain how it is rational to discuss "climate change" in tenths of degrees or hundredths of degrees when most of the methods used to measure temperatures on Earth before a century ago were in whole degrees, and most of THOSE
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Certainly no tree ring or ice core has a calibrated accuracy of tenths or hundredths of a degree.
Haven't you seen how straight a hockey stick is? :-)
Re: (Score:1)
If measurement inaccuracies occur randomly, you can still generate highly accurate results of aggregate parameters in a system, such as averages. What you need is lots of data. Generally, the error in such a derived value is S / sqrt(N) where S is the error in the individual measurements, and N is the number of measurements. So, the more data you have, the lower the standard error of the derived quantity. That is how climate scientists can speak meaningfully about parameters in fractions of a degree.
Re: (Score:1)
Anyone that tells you that they know the temperature anywhere to one tenth of a degree is lying to you. Let alone what the temperature in some place 150 years ago was to a tenth of a degree.
Think about how many samples you would need to have in order to even state what the temperature of any given -room- is to a tenth of a degree.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone that tells you that they know the temperature anywhere to one tenth of a degree is lying to you. Let alone what the temperature in some place 150 years ago was to a tenth of a degree.
Well then, it's a good thing that climate scientists claim nothing of the kind. It's possible to calculate a very accurate average rate of increase of temperature over a long period with many inaccurate measurements. If you don't understand how that's possible, then you don't understand statistical analysis.
Think about how many samples you would need to have in order to even state what the temperature of any given -room- is to a tenth of a degree.
Again, you misunderstand what it is that's being calculated to a fraction of a degree. You're committing a similar kind of error that some people do when they confuse climate and weather.
But you can in f
Re: (Score:2)
It's possible to calculate a very accurate average rate of increase of temperature over a long period with many inaccurate measurements.
Sorry, I should have said less accurate measurements, not inaccurate ones. But my point stands otherwise.
James Burke's 'After the Warming' came out in 1989 (Score:2)
and I watched it with great interest and an open mind, being a huge fan of James Burke. (See his "Connections" series to understand why.) Global warming was not talked about anywhere in the mainstream outside of scientists. The hand-wringing of the day concerned saving the rain forests from the evil Burger King that was chopping down rain forests in Costa Rica in order to create grazing lands for cattle. I made investments in 1993 that aligned with the Kyoto Accord, feeling that surely that the Clinton-Gore
Unprecedented? (Score:2, Insightful)
They keep using that word, I don't think it means what they think it means.
Just remember records only go back about 150 years. The Earth is 4 billion years old.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure we don't give a crap what the climate was like before multicellular life existed. We probably care far more for what the climate has been since humanity developed the language with which to describe the climate, and the instruments and knowledge to measure it's properties.
If anyone can prove that there was global warming on the scale we see today before humans developed language, and certainly before humans burned fossil fuels in significant quantities, then that places doubt on humans being able to avoid catastrophic global warming by changing where we get our energy. If we see global warming no matter what we do then it is a matter of working to adapt to the changes than trying to push back the rising tide by standing on the beach.
And since those landmark moments in history, this hasn't been happening. But keep your head in the sand, I'm sure that's going to work out really well.
Keep your head in the sand on how scienti
Artificial crisis (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Can you explain why California emptied out all water reservoirs and destroyed multiple dams before the fires?
To protect the delta smelt.
Why did they make it impossible for fire insurance to operate in the the state?
Misplaced priorities.
Why is there a recorded footage of drone setting things on fire?
Because they put cameras everywhere they can.
An illegal carrying a torch was caught by locals to be later released by police.
I'll have to think on that one.
Why there is three DEI gender-fluid persons in charge of the California fire department?
Because there is a culture war on White Christian heterosexual men, the very people they rely upon to do the dirty work that they refuse to do. The people making these DEI hiring decisions hate themselves, hate their own culture, and generally just hate. They are driven by hate to a point they have become effectively suicidal. While they won't eat lead they will have themselves rend
Yay for complex systems! (Score:2)
No matter how hard the evidence sways in any direction, neither side ever has to admit they're wrong. There is always a little uncertainty to hide in.
It's the epistemological god of the gaps. And it's dangerous.
The problem arises when it is used to justify doing nothing, or continuing to do things that are detrimental on the basis that certainty has not been achieved. And since it can never be achieved, deniers can ride that right into the scorched earth.
One side risks some unnecessary discomfort incurred i