Volunteers clear mud from a street in the municipality of Massanassa near Valencia, Spain, on November 7, 2024, as the area recovered from catastrophic flash flooding. More than 200 were killed, mostly in the Valencia region, amid the flooding that swept eastern and southern parts of the country. (Image credit: David Ramos/Getty Images) 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. 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 […]
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