Increasingly severe heat waves are among the effects of climate change around the globe. | Reuters photo Newsletter Sign Up – Receive free Western Producer newsletters Breaking ag news stories and commodities markets snapshots delivered daily right to your inbox! Your Email Your Postal Code Consent I consent to receiving emails from Glacier FarmMedia, its affiliates and divisions and third parties, containing agriculture news, updates and promotions. I can unsubscribe at any time LONDON/MEXICO CITY (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — Intolerable heat, unsurvivable storms, inescapable floods — in 2024, billions of people across the world faced climatic conditions that broke record after record, logging ever more highs for heat, floods, storms, fire and drought. As the year drew to a close, the conclusion was both blatant and bleak: 2024 was the hottest year since records began, according to European climate scientists. However, it may not hold this dubious honour for long. “This is life now and it’s not going to get easier. It’s only going to get harder. That’s what climate change means,” said Andrew Pershing, chief programs officer at Climate Central, a U.S.-based non-profit climate advocacy group. “Because we continue to pollute the atmosphere, we’re going to get, year after year, warmer and warmer oceans, warmer and warmer lands, bigger and badder storms.” Others use still bolder language. “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” said the 2024 State of the Climate report. Here’s how that looked this year, what 2025 holds and why there are still reasons to be hopeful. This was the first year when the planet was more than 1.5 C hotter than it was in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, a time when humans did not burn fossil fuels on a mass scale, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The […]