Rising risks: More than half a million people were killed in 10 disasters that climate change worsened, says report. — ©2024 NYTC
A RECENT report shows the 10 deadliest extreme weather events in the past two decades were made worse by burning fossil fuels.
More than half a million people around the world were killed in those disasters since 2004.
“Many people now understand that climate change is already making life more dangerous,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, the group that published the report. “What has not worked yet is turning knowledge into action on a large-enough scale.”
Even with the abundance of evidence on how a warming world is endangering human life, the world keeps burning fossil fuels: 2023, the hottest year on record, also set a record for greenhouse gas emissions.
The stakes are high for how the world will respond later this month at the annual climate summit of world leaders, COP29, hosted in Azerbaijan. Developing countries, hit hard by climate disasters, are pressing for rich countries to make good on their pledges to curb emissions and fund climate adaptation projects.
“The United States, and really the world, face a very sharp fork in the road,” said Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at the Columbia Law School.
On Nov 5, the United States, the highest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, voted on its climate future. A Kamala Harris presidency could have continued the work of Joe Biden’s administration in transitioning to renewable energy, largely through tax credits and increased American manufacturing of clean energy technologies.
Now that he’s back in office, Donald Trump could roll back environmental regulations, including those that limit greenhouse gases, and continue development of fossil fuels. He could also pull out of international agreements to fight climate change, as he did in his first term as president.
From tomorrow until Nov 22, the world’s leaders will meet at COP29. In Azerbaijan, a tiny petrostate on the borders of Russia and Iran, they will seek to agree on how to lower global emissions fast enough that temperatures remain below 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels.
But the planet has already warmed 1.3°C since rich countries began burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas on an enormous scale. The world may now be on track to reach 3°C of warming by the end of the century, according to Otto and other climate scientists.
Last year, summit attendees pledged to transition away from fossil fuels, but the pact came with heavy caveats. Otto said she hoped this year’s conference would create a stricter timeline for that transition that could hold countries accountable.
The group of nations also set up a damages fund to help poorer countries with historically low emissions adapt to climate change. The fund, which has about US$700mil (RM3.1bil) pledged, is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related damage developing countries may incur by 2030.
“It’s a ridiculously and insultingly low sum of money to help the most vulnerable countries with dealing with the losses and damages,” Otto said. “That needs to be orders of magnitude bigger.”
The new study showed that death tolls from extreme weather events are often higher in poor countries. Researchers culled the list of weather episodes from the International Disaster Database, and included three tropical cyclones, four heatwaves, two floods, and a drought. They noted that the high death toll was “a major underestimate”, with potentially millions of unreported heat-related deaths not included.
Europe faced well-documented heatwaves in 2015, 2022, and 2023 that led to almost 94,000 deaths. Another report released this week shows that during a 2022 heatwave in Europe that caused 68,000 deaths, more than half of those deaths could be traced back to human-induced climate change. But poor countries suffered more in extreme weather. In Somalia, a 2011 drought made worse by rising temperatures that sucked water vapour from plants led to 258,000 deaths; in Myanmar, Cyclone Nargis formed in 2008 over warmer seas and most likely had higher wind speeds and more intense precipitation as a result of climate change. It killed more than 138,000 people.
Climate attribution studies are now 20 years old, and more than 500 have been published by researchers. The first was published in 2004, according to World Weather Attribution; it showed that the likelihood of Europe’s 2003 summer, the hottest the continent had seen since 1500, was doubled by climate change.
To make such assessments, scientists pair weather observations with climate models and work with local experts and meteorological agencies. Attribution studies can help raise awareness of climate change, but researchers have a hard time finding funding, said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in applied mathematics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“We have the technology and we have the methodology and the machines, the data and the experts,” Wehner said. “But they’ve got to be paid to do this, and they’re not.”
In its report, World Weather Attribution highlighted the need for protecting vulnerable people, improving early warning systems, and strengthening infrastructure like homes from flooding events, before the world reaches its limit for resilience.
But some events are now so extreme, experts warned, that governments could reach the limits of adaptation, underscoring the need to try to curb global warming as quickly as possible.
“Climate change has already made life incredibly hard and really dangerous, and we’re only at 1.3 degrees of warming,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at Imperial College London. “We’re likely to see an escalation of impacts and the continual suffering of vulnerable people.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
