This weekly round-up brings you key climate news from the past seven days, including 2024 officially confirmed as the hottest year on record, Los Angeles’ historic wildfires, and Thailand’s ban on plastic imports.
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1. 2024, Hottest Year on Record, Surpasses 1.5C Mark Amid Rise in Greenhouse Gases
Earth’s temperature hit new milestones in 2024: reaching record-breaking levels and rising to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
That last year was going to be the warmest on record became clear a few months ago, when global temperatures did not fall as predicted after El Niño subsided last June. The weather pattern, which is associated with the warming of sea surface temperatures in the central-east equatorial Pacific, pushed global temperatures “off the charts” in 2023, making it the hottest year on record.
But while conditions in the equatorial Pacific returned to normal mid last year, global temperatures did not.
“All of us who made projections at the start of the year underestimated just how warm 2024 would be,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth.
On Friday, the EU’s Earth observation programme Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) also confirmed another earlier prediction: that 2024 marked the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5C above its pre-industrial level. While this does not signal a permanent breach of the critical limit, which scientists say is measured over decades, it sends a clear warning to humanity that we are approaching the point of no return much faster than expected.
2. At Least 5 Dead, 70,000 Evacuated Amid Historic Blazes in Drought-Stricken LA
Fast-spreading, out-of-control wildfires have prompted widespread evacuations in the Los Angeles region, shocking the nation as footage captures homes ablaze and vast swaths of vegetation consumed by the relentless fires.
A combination of several factors have allowed the fires to grow and spread rapidly.
Powerful Santa Ana winds, with speeds reaching up to 80mph and even 100mph in certain areas, have fanned the flames at an unprecedented pace, leading to “one of the most significant fire outbreaks in history,” according to meteorologist Ariel Cohen.
These dry, warm winds originate from the western desert interior of the United States and push towards southern California, creating ideal conditions for wildfires by reducing humidity and drying out vegetation. These winds have fuelled some of Los Angeles worst wildfires in the past.
Adding to that was an abundance of dry, fire-prone vegetation in the area.
Southern California has experienced “exceptionally dry” conditions following two winters of heavy rainfall in 2022 and 2023.
3. Thailand’s Ban on Plastic Imports Comes into Force as Campaigners Warn of Challenges in Enforcement
A ban on plastic waste imports has come into force in Thailand, two years after it was announced in a bid to control pollution and protect people’s health.
Thailand and other developing countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, have acted as the dumping ground for foreign nations’ trash for decades. Until 2017, China was the world’s largest importer of plastic waste, bringing in an average of 8 million tonnes of plastic a year from more than 90 nations around the world. To tackle the pressing plastic pollution crisis, the Chinese government in 2018 introduced an import ban on solid waste, including several types of plastics and other recyclable waste.
Since then, big exporters like the US, which was shipping about 4,000 containers of garbage to China every day before the ban came into effect, rerouted most of their trash to Southeast Asia nations such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand.
4. Biden Locks in Offshore Drilling Ban Weeks Before Trump Takes Office, Ramps Up Fossil Fuel Production
US President Joe Biden has issued a decree that permanently bans new offshore oil and gas development across 625 million acres of US coastal waters. The move comes just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump, a climate denier, takes office with the promise to expand fossil fuel production in the country.
The ban, which has no expiration date, concerns all future oil and natural gas leasing in an area that extends to the entire US East coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.
Speaking on a radio show after the ban was announced, Trump said he would “unban it immediately,” though it might no be easy.
In contrast to many executive actions that can be easily reversed, Biden’s offshore drilling ban is rooted in a long-standing 72-year-old law, which grants the White House extensive authority to permanently shield US waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly providing presidents with the ability to retract these protections once they are established.
5. Australia’s Southeast Braces for Extreme Fire Risk Amid Intense Heatwave
A heatwave in Australia’s southeast intensified over the weekend, increasing the risk of bushfires and prompting fire bans across the region.
The heatwave sent the mercury above 40C in parts of the state of Victoria on Sunday, prompting local authorities to issue total fire bans across three districts facing “extreme” fire danger.
The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) last year predicted a “normal” fire season for most of 2024 amid “wetter-than-normal conditions” and “an increased chance of above average rainfall through winter and spring.” However, it also added that fire activity could increase in early 2025 amid an increase in temperatures across the country.
2024 was Australia’s second-hottest year on record overall, behind only 2019, with the average temperature 1.46C above the 1961-1990 average. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology also noted that Australia’s ten hottest years all occurred in the past two decades and that only two years of the past 40 have been cooler than average, the Guardian reported.
6. Costliest Climate Disasters of 2024 Racked Up More than $229bn in Damages, Killed 2,000: Report
The ten costliest climate disasters of 2024 caused more than $229 billion in damages, according to an analysis by non-profit Christian Aid.
From deadly floods in China, Europe and East Africa to tropical storms in the Atlantic and Pacific, scorching heatwaves in India and droughts in South America, no region was spared by extreme weather events this year, the hottest year on record.
The ranking was compiled based on an analysis of insurance payouts alone, focusing on storms and cyclones due to their significant impact on infrastructure compared to any other type of extreme weather event. Because it does not take into account costs deriving losses in crop production and delays in trading, among others, the true financial toll of these events is believe to be much higher.
