This weekly round-up brings you key climate news from the past seven days, including new data confirming summer 2024 as the hottest on record and worrisome rise in wildfires in Brazil.
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1. Record-Breaking Summer Signals 2024 Could Be the Hottest Year Ever, European Scientists Say
This year is well on track to be the hottest on record after a record-breaking summer and the highest year-to-date global average temperature, European scientists confirmed on Friday.
The global-average temperature between June and August was the highest in the Copernicus Climate Change Service’s (C3S) ERA5 dataset at 0.69C above the 1991-2020 average for the same period and 0.03C higher than the previous record set last year.
According to C3S, a service operated by the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation programme, July was the second-hottest on record, just 0.04C shy than the average temperature in July 2023. However, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) later found it to be the hottest on record. July also saw two back-to-back record-breaking daily temperatures.
Between January and August, the global-average temperature anomaly was 0.70C above the 1991-2020 average, 0.23C warmer than the previous highest anomaly recorded in 2023. For 2024 not to be warmer than 2023, the anomaly for the remaining months of the year would need to decrease by at least 0.30C – a highly unlikely scenario, said C3S.
Read more here.
2. Bangladesh Floods Leave 71 Dead As UNICEF Warns of ‘Unprecedented’ Challenges
The floods, the worst in 34 years for the region, have affected an estimated 5.9 million people – including more than 2 million children – and left at least 71 dead as of Tuesday. More than half a million people were displaced, with thousands currently at evacuation shelters.
Speaking from the southeastern district of Feni, the epicenter of the flooding, UNICEF Deputy Representative to Bangladesh Emma Brigham on Monday talked about “unprecedented times” in the country as she appealed for support.
“Bangladesh is a country that is normally very good at dealing with cyclones, with flooding, they happen all too frequently. But this case is different. It’s happened in an area that doesn’t normally suffer from cyclones and flooding so the preparedness levels were not what they should’ve been amongst communities,” Bringham told CNN.
Read more here.
3. Drought-Stricken Brazil Sees 80% Yearly Rise in Wildfires in 2024 As Toxic Smoke Spreads Across the Country
Wildfires in drought-stricken Brazil have surged to the highest level since 2010 in August as government figures suggested criminal actions were behind the spike.
Last week, environment minister Marina Silva said during an emergency meeting with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that the country was “at war” with fire, adding that the historic surge in blazes was “unusual” and was being investigated by federal police.
The biome has recorded 38,266 fire hotspots last month, more than double compared to the same time last year according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Inpe). More than 80% of them were concentrated in the states of Para (36%), Amazonas (29%) and Mato Grosso (16%).
Read more here.
4. Italy’s Southern Islands Drought Made 50% More Likely By Climate Change, Study Finds
The “extreme” drought affecting two major Italian islands was made 50% more likely by climate change and exacerbated further by the region’s ageing water infrastructure, a new attribution study has revealed.
In Sicily and Sardinia – the two largest islands in the Mediterranean, home to 5 and 1.6 million people, respectively – a year of “exceptionally low rainfall and persistent heat” have created the perfect conditions for the exceptional droughts, among the worst on record. In July, both islands were in a state of emergency as bone-dry conditions led to devastating wildfires that destroyed farmland and forests. Sicily accounted for 45% of wildfires so far this year; Sardinia for 10%.
Conducted by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an academic collaboration studying extreme event attribution, and published Wednesday, the analysis revealed that without human-driven warming, the droughts on both islands would not have been classified as “extreme.”
Read more here.
5. Super Typhoon Yagi Nears Southern China After Killing At Least 17 in the Philippines
Yagi intensified into a Super Typhoon on Wednesday night local time and is currently the equivalent of a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane, with sustained wind speeds of 210 km/h (130 mph). It is expected to make a rare landfall as a super typhoon in Hainan in the evening of Friday. Between 1949 and 2023, of the 106 typhoons which made landfall in Hainan, only 9 were classified as super typhoons.
Typhoon Yagi formed as a tropical storm on Sunday in the western Philippine Sea. It crossed the islands, dumping 25cm (10 inches) of rain on the northern city of Luzon before moving westward toward the South China Sea. Yagi’s torrential rainfall led to floods and landslides in the northern part of the archipelago, killing at least 13 people.
Typhoons – also known as hurricanes in the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, and eastern North Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific – are a rather common weather phenomenon, though there has been a significant increase in their intensity in recent decades, which scientific observations link to anthropogenic climate change.
Read more here.
