Five horsemen of the Apocalypse? Climate Science Portal prepared a subjective review of the most important events in 2024. It indicated as many as five events from which I will remember the past year. Unfortunately, we can reveal it right from the beginning: none of these events are positive. They are only a symbol of how climate change is increasingly affecting our reality.
1. CO2 emissions and concentration are at record levels again: The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise and deepens global warming. Carbon dioxide emissions have been calculated coal from fossil sources will amount to approximately PLN 37.4 billion in 2024. tons, i.e. by 0.8 percent more than in the record year 2023. Combined with emissions resulting from, among others, from deforestation or draining wetlands will reach 41.6 billion tons. Last year's levels was exceeded by approximately one billion tons. May was the worst. Then the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, measured on Mauna Loa, reached 427 ppm.
2. Record temperatures: Earth's average global temperature has reached its highest value on record. Last year's record was beaten. This was primarily due to the tropical El Niño phenomenon lasting in the first half of the year. This year was also record-breaking for Europe and Poland. The temperature was high in many places in our country the highest in the history of measurements. What stood out the most here was February, which was as much as 6 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. According to preliminary estimates, it was also exceeded global warming level of 1.5 degrees Celsius. relative to the pre-industrial level.
3. Great Floods: In September, a flood swept through Central Europe. For Poland it was the largest disaster of this type since 1997. The flood that hit Valencia was considered one of the greatest weather disasters in the modern history of Spain. Outside Europe, devastating floods have hit Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi in East Africa, among others. Hundreds of people lost their lives because of this. “According to climatologists' estimates, this type of intense rainfall is about twice as common due to global warming than in pre-industrial times,” the summary noted.
4. Wildfires in Canada: This is the second year in a row that Canadian forests are on fire. In 2024 fires consumed over 5 million hectares of forests. Some of them started in 2023 or resulted from their incomplete expiry. Early estimates put CO2 emissions from these fires at around 200 million tons. “The effects of these fires were visible to the naked eye hundreds and thousands of kilometers away, because the smoke from them enveloped a large part of Canada, as well as the bordering part of the United States, and at some point also reached Western and Northern Europe across the Atlantic,” writes Nauka o Climate. The fires also affected, among others, Chile.
5. Typhoon Yagi: At its peak it reached 260 km/h. It cost the lives of over 400 people in Burma and over 400 in Vietnam 300. Hundreds of thousands of homes in Asia were damaged or completely destroyed. In the summary it was called: “the most costly single weather event of 2024 in terms of property damage“. In Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and China, it caused losses amounting to many billions of dollars. This year's hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean was the second most expensive in history. In the United States alone, it caused losses of 190 billion dollars.
Also read Kacper Kolibabski's text: “It's bigger than Central Park and full of secrets. A day is not enough to discover them. The Silesian Park is a pearl.
Sources: : scienceoklimacie.pl