Climate Change 2024: The Year in Disasters

By Dave Levitan  |  December 18, 2024 | 10:00am
Photo by Jacek Halicki/Wikimedia Commons
Climate Disasters
Climate Change 2024: The Year in Disasters

It has been, once again, a warm year. That’s pretty much the state of things from here on out, of course — but the details of that warmth, its impacts, and how we humans are trying or failing to manage it, can obviously vary considerably. We’ve published hundreds of posts about the climate and all its tentacles this year, and so we will take a few looks back at what happened — today, we start with the worst of it: disasters.

According to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the U.S. suffered 24 billion-plus-dollar disasters in 2024 — well, up until November 1, that is. These began with a winter storm or two, followed by tornado outbreaks and severe thunderstorms in April, but of course only really picked up steam with the start of hurricane season.

With its catastrophic second half, it might be hard to remember that the first bad hurricane struck outside the U.S., way back in late June and early July. Beryl left “almost total destruction” behind it in Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with its early-season record strength offering a dire lesson in the injustice at the heart of climate change.

A month later, Hurricane Debby made landfall before a reduction in wind speeds masked its real power: rain. The storm dropped unfathomable amounts of water on parts of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas — a “once-in-a-thousand-year potential rainfall event,” per Savannah’s city manager, though of course once-in-a-thousand doesn’t mean what it used to.

Atlantic hurricane season then took some time off, even if other basins filled in — like in Japan, where typhoon Shanshan was among the strongest the country had seen in decades, causing at least $6 billion in damage.

By the time September rolled around, the theme of the year in disasters started to become clear: The Year of the Flood. Another mostly forgotten storm, Hurricane Francine, drowned portions of Louisiana in early September; flooding in central Europe a few days later reached “epic proportions,” and by the end of the month flooding had affected everywhere from Italy to Chad to Nepal to Mexico. And then Hurricane Helene arrived.

Among the most devastating storms to hit the U.S. since Katrina, Helene’s final death toll reached past 230 people, and its total cost will be in the tens or even hundreds of billions. Similar to the following Hurricane Milton, which devastated parts of Florida, some people will leave their homes in these storms’ wake and simply never go back. The flooding kept going in Spain, where a month’s rain in a day in late October killed more than 200 people.

Importantly, rapid attribution studies examined many of these events, finding, for example, that the central European floods were twice as likely with warming, and that Helene’s devastating rainfall was 10 percent heavier and 70 percent more likely thanks to climate change.

As the year has wound down, most floodwaters have receded but the disasters aren’t totally done with us. Wildfires, which have mostly kept under the radar in the face of the deluge, have quietly burned more than 8.5 million acres; in mid-December a big one was threatening one of the richest zip codes in the country.

And in the background of all this fire, and water, and catastrophe is the heat itself. When the final numbers come in early in January, multiple agencies say that 2024 will almost certainly rank as the hottest year in the century-plus of recorded history, topping 2023’s record. The top 10 list will reorder once more, until the next year, when we will do it again, each individual disaster just a tendril of flame or flood flickering off the metaphorical mercury, rising higher.

 
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