More than ever, relentless global warming cast a shadow on the weather and climate happenings of 2024. It was the second year in a row (this one even warmer than 2023) when the average global temperature was in the vicinity of the 1.5°C-above-preindustrial threshold that policymakers have long pledged to avoid.While researchers struggled to explain exactly why the global heat spike of 2023-24 – similar to the ones from previous El Niño events, but even sharper – played out the way it did, people on the front lines were left to tackle the consequences, one disaster at a time.
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Flooding was an especially prominent outcome across the Northern Hemisphere in 2024. The floodwaters ravaged communities and ecosystems and took thousands of lives, across landscapes ranging from the semi-arid savannahs of northern and central Africa to the dense urban corridors of Valencia, Spain, to the remote mountain valleys of western North Carolina. Intensified rainfall – a long-established consequence of human-caused climate change – exacerbated several of this year’s flood disasters, as explained and quantified by researchers at World Weather Attribution and Climate Central.
Amid these and other catastrophes, activists continued to push hard for greenhouse-gas emission reductions. Yet the United Nations’ 29th annual Conference of Parties meeting (COP 29), held in November in Baku, Azerbaijan, ended up with agreements for climate finance that fell short of what many activists had sought. “No country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work to do,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell in the meeting’s closing address on November 24.
Through all the turmoil of 2024, the skies above continued to provide undeniable beauty, especially in two eye-popping events: a long-anticipated total solar eclipse viewed by millions of North Americans on April 8, and a short-notice burst of solar storms in May, including one spectacular night of auroras seen over much of the planet on May 10.
Below are photos from a few of 2024’s noteworthy events in weather and climate, related policy and activism, and celestial phenomena.
A woman walks along the Lake Michigan shoreline at Whiting, Indiana, on February 18, 2024. (Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)Not so great in the Great Lakes: A winter of record-low ice coverage
The coastlines of the Great Lakes are typically ice-covered by February, but near-record warmth led to the least ice cover over the lakes since record keeping began in 1973. Instead of around 40 percent of the lake surface being frozen at the late-winter peak extent, as is typical, this year’s ice coverage peaked at only about 4 percent, as revealed in NASA satellite analyses.
Angie Hodges searches for items in the remains of her home on March 3, 2024, nea