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A person rides past a destroyed church in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene flooding on October 6, 2024, in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Scientists say that climate change increased the storm’s deadly rainfall by about 10%. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)Earth’s climate in 2024 is “in a major crisis with worse to come if we continue with business as usual,” a team of 14 climate scientists warned in “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth.” The report did not sugarcoat their view of the dangers humanity is facing.
“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” the report begins. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
The report is the latest such annual peer-reviewed paper published in the journal BioScience by an international team of scientists led by Oregon State ecologist William Ripple.
The authors found that 25 of 35 “planetary vital signs” reached record levels last year, including global temperatures, human climate pollution, fossil fuel subsidies, heat-related mortality rates, meat production, and loss of forest cover.
After decades of warnings from climate scientists and efforts by some policymakers and activists, “the world has made only very minor headway on climate change, in part because of stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel-based system,” it says. “We are currently going in the wrong direction and our increasing fossil-fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are driving us toward a climate catastrophe. We fear the danger of climate breakdown.”
They did note a few positive indicators like clean energy production.
“Of course, the situation is not hopeless,” wrote Harvard science historian and study co-author Naomi Oreskes via email. “What we want people to understand is that, while there has been progress – particularly in the price and deployment of renewables – it’s not nearly enough. And the atmosphere does not respond to our intentions. It responds to chemistry.”
The report calls for “rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use” by ratcheting up the carbon price in wealthy countries and using some of the proceeds to fund policies to stop climate change and adaptation programs to reduce damage from climate disasters. It also urges sharp reductions in emissions of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, to “slow the near-term rate of global warming, helping to avoid tipping points and extreme climate impacts.”
Without a course correction, the report warned, “climate change could cause many millions of additional deaths by 2050.”
Stressed planetary vital signs and scientists
Average global surface air and ocean temperatures shattered records in 2023, and are on track to do so again in 2024. The report notes that this extreme heat exacerbated numerous damaging and deadly extreme weather events over the past year, ranging from heat waves, droughts, and wildfires to hurricanes and floods.
Some other planetary indicators setting records over the past year include global sea level rise, ocean acidity and heat content, the amount of ice on Greenland and Antarctica and in glaciers around the world, and tree cover loss due to wildfires. Preliminary findings from another recent report made headlines for finding that Earth’s trees, plants, and soils absorbed almost no carbon in 2023 due in part to the year’s record wildfires. But climate scientist Zeke Hausfather noted that this phenomenon sometimes happens in years with El Niño events.
While human activity is responsible for long-term global warming, 2023 and 2024 were also influenced by an El Niño in the Pacific Ocean, which drew warm water up to the sea surface and contributed to short-term surface warming and associated climate impacts like droughts and wildfires in some regions.
Nevertheless, the report warned that human influence on Earth’s climate kept growing. Global fossil fuel consumption and associated climate-warming pollution reached record levels in 2023. So did the number of meat and dairy cattle and other ruminant livestock whose digestive processes generate planet-warming methane pollution, along with global per-person meat consumption.
The report also referenced a recent survey of climate scientists conducted by the Guardian in which more than three-quarters of the 380 respondents believed humanity will miss the target set in the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.
How 380 climate scientists who have contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports responded to the question, “How high above preindustrial levels do you think average global temperature will rise between now and 2100?” Created by Dana Nuccitelli from Guardian survey data.
There is some encouraging evidence of such decisive action, albeit at insufficient levels so far. Expert organizations like the International Energy Agency project that based on current climate policies, the world is headed toward around 2.5°C global warming by 2100. That’s not enough to meet the Paris climate targets, and yet implementing additional climate policies and solutions in the coming years could improve that outcome even further to levels below the worried expectations of three-quarters of climate scientists.
Any course correction depends largely on governments’ climate policy actions in the coming years, and the report includes some good news in this arena.
A few positive signs
For example, global renewable energy consumption reached record levels in 2023. The report notes that so far the increase in clean energy has only been sufficient to meet some of the world’s rising power demand, and fossil fuel consumption also reached record levels last year to meet the rest of that growing thirst for energy. But the persistent rise in fossil fuel combustion is finally poised to stop, as organizations like the International Energy Agency forecast that global coal, oil, and gas consumption will all peak within the next five years, and global climate pollution may be peaking right now.
The “State of the climate” report also notes that while the forest area lost to wildfires is reaching record levels, the level of global deforestation due directly to human activities in places like the Brazilian Amazon is declining due to government policies.
Among further indicators of successful climate action efforts, the amount of institutional assets divested from fossil fuels and the fraction of climate pollution covered by carbon pricing also reached record levels last year. In other words, fewer organizations are investing in fossil fuel company stocks, and more countries are charging a price for the climate-warming emissions from an increasing number of economic sectors.
“Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering, and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve,” the report concludes. “The future of humanity hangs in the balance.”
The state of the climate is currently perilous, but humanity still has every opportunity to reduce the level of peril.
I think the scientific community needs to be more direct about the causality of the changes we are seeing in the atmosphere, oceans and land. Fossil fuel emissions are absolutely driving the changes that are occurring, and yet so much of what is put out by the scientific community and journalists is a variation of: "climate change is the source of the extreme weather events/coral bleaching/poleward shift of species....etc."
Much is being done to delineate how much the probability of an individual extreme weather event or wildfire has been changed by climate change, and yet this does not point the causality back to the source!
We do not say that a sporting event performance change caused the latest world record in a track and field event to be broken if performance enhancing drugs were involved: we say that the use of anabolic steroids caused the improved performance that resulted in the new world record! And since performance enhancing drugs injure the athletes, their use has been banned.
The scientific community needs to do the same thing and start making those causal connections to the rest of our communities: fossil fuel emissions have juiced the atmospheric chemistry (as well as the oceans) and the results are enhanced weather events: more extreme flooding, droughts, more wildfires, a shift in habitable zones for species, etc.
This is the point that needs to driven in over and over again: the public understands the deleterious effects of performance enhancing drugs, and they can do the same with understanding the causal effects of fossil fuel emissions if we stop obscuring this dynamic by calling it all being caused by "climate change." Even "climate change triggered by human activity" or even "climate change caused by fossil fuels" doesn't cut it if we want the causal link to be very clear, which is exactly what we need if we expect folks to change their habits.
wilddouglascounty,
I generally agree. However, I would add that it is essential to also include the harmful fact of misleading marketing success. That would make the important point something like “the increasing damage being done by the successful misleading marketing promotion and excusing of prolonged harmful abuse of fossil fuels”.
The most problematic part of “business as usual” is the “successful misleading marketing”. That also applies to politics, especially to politics influenced by business or religious interests.
Political, business and religious pursuits can be motivated by a desire to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to others. But in competitions for perceptions of status (wealth, popularity, power) the motivations to benefit from being more harmful and less helpful, motivation to get away with cheating, can overpower more ethical and moral understanding.
People who allow their ‘pursuit of learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others’ to be overpowered or compromised by interests that conflict with learning to be less harmful and more helpful are a serious concern. Their impacts can add up to ‘massive tragedies of the commons’.
And people who try to benefit from misleading other people need to be understood to be behaving criminally rather than being excused or being admired for their appearances of success, especially in business and politics.
SkS is very helpful in efforts to reduce the success of misleading marketing (development and spreading of disinformation and misinformation).
My issue is that we are missing the point when we are saying that climate change CAUSES anything. Specifically, good science has established the following causal links:
Fossil fuel emissions (FFE) > changed atmospheric chemistry > increased temperatures(IT).
FFE > IT > more frequent, severe droughts>more extreme wildfires
FFE > IT > more frequent, severe flooding caused by increased water in atmosphere
FFE > IT > poleward shift of species habitats
FFE > IT > increased glacial melt>sea level rise, exacerbated by expansion of water volume by it being warmer
FFE > IT > warmer oceans > coral bleaching, myriad other effects
FFE > increased acidification of oceans>plankton die-offs>myriad other effects
Where is the causal link to climate change? "Climate change" is an abstraction that has been reified to give it causal qualities that it doesn't have. This reified abstraction has been given false attribution qualities that properly belong to fossil fuel emissions.
People understand that anabolic steroids enhance performance of athletes, and injecting fossil fuel emissions into the air is juicing the atmospheric chemistry in exactly the same manner. Folks will understand this causal link in exactly the same way if we only use the term "climate change" as the OUTCOME of fossil fuel emissions, not the CAUSE of the changes that are taking place. That belongs to fossil fuel emissions.
The issue is that controlled experiments and clinical trials can prove that drugs can enhance human performance. Recall reading this article Drug Test years ago by the now never-Trumper Stuart Stevens who was doing experiments as himself as a test subject.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/drug-test/
Alas, no such controlled experiments in climate science, which always places any extrapolations under suspicion.
Of course you cannot do controlled experiments in climate science, because we don't have another set of planets to do double blind experiments with. That doesn't mean that we can't have a good understanding of the physical role fossil fuel emissions play in the climate system of the planet we live on. We understand enough of the physics of the parts to create models that we can backcast and refine, and compare against alternatives, right? Do you have a better physical model that explains the climate change data without needing fossil fuel emissions playing the part that they do according to our measurements of what the physical properties of those gases are?
The causal links between fossil fuel emissions and the dynamics of the climate system is good science that only gets better and better with time. Hence the need to start clarifying that fossil fuel emissions are driving the new extremes, without the reified abstraction of "climate change" as the driver.
The problem is geo engineering is now a private industry and not to be written off as conspiracy any more. If you start puttinh dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere it effects wild fires, effecrs staristics and real comparitive data.
Great link to some scary technologies in the name of climate and net zero are geo engineering and mining into rich carbon storage for minierals in the deep sea.
[link to UNDP.org site]
[BL] Link activated.
The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box.
Also keep in mind that it helps to give some explanation of what people should expect to find at the link, and how it relates to the topic being discussed. Your description is a little short on details.
I believe that climate change, caused in large part by fossil fuel combustion and other human influences, COVARIES with all the increased temperature effects. FFI, as wilddouglascounty points out, CAUSES climate change, which has become a general term that encompasses the results listed (and others).
How would one quantify climate change except with its covariates?