Articles

Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights findings from our attribution studies. It also includes new analysis looking at the number of dangerous heat days added by climate change in 2024 and global resolutions for 2025 to work toward a safer, more sustainable world.

Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Morocco experienced extreme heat in July 2024, causing at least 23 fatalities, widespread wildfires and bringing public life to a hold.

The floods displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing (Governo do Estado de Rio Grande do Sul, 2024). Essential services were also disrupted, leaving 418,200 households without electricity and over a million consumer units without water. Dozens of municipalities lost telephone and internet services.

Following a record hot June, large areas of the US and Mexico, Southern Europe and China experienced extreme heat in July 2023, breaking many local high temperature records.

Since the beginning of March, India and Pakistan and large parts of South Asia experienced prolonged heat, that at the time of writing, May 2022, still hasn’t subsided.

All available evidence taken together, including physical understanding, observations over a larger region and different regional climate models give high confidence that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of such an event to occur and these changes will continue in a rapidly warming climate

During the last days of June 2021, Pacific northwest areas of the U.S. and Canada experienced temperatures never previously observed, with records broken in many places by several degrees Celsius.

In our latest study, scientists from France, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK collaborated to examine whether and to what extent human-induced climate change had a part to play in the cold early April following a very warm March 2021 that led to large scale frost damages in grapevines and fruit trees in central France.