Portraits of catastrophe and courage in 2024 » Yale Climate Connections

More than ever, relentless global warming cast a shadow on the weather and climate happenings of 2024. It was the second year in a row (this one even warmer than 2023) when the average global temperature was in the vicinity of the 1.5°C-above-preindustrial threshold that policymakers have long pledged to avoid.

While researchers struggled to explain exactly why the global heat spike of 2023-24 – similar to the ones from previous El Niño events, but even sharper – played out the way it did, people on the front lines were left to tackle the consequences, one disaster at a time.

Flooding was an especially prominent outcome across the Northern Hemisphere in 2024. The floodwaters ravaged communities and ecosystems and took thousands of lives, across landscapes ranging from the semi-arid savannahs of northern and central Africa to the dense urban corridors of Valencia, Spain, to the remote mountain valleys of western North Carolina. Intensified rainfall – a long-established consequence of human-caused climate change – exacerbated several of this year’s flood disasters, as explained and quantified by researchers at World Weather Attribution and Climate Central.

Amid these and other catastrophes, activists continued to push hard for greenhouse-gas emission reductions. Yet the United Nations’ 29th annual Conference of Parties meeting (COP 29), held in November in Baku, Azerbaijan, ended up with agreements for climate finance that fell short of what many activists had sought. “No country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work to do,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell in the meeting’s closing address on November 24.

Through all the turmoil of 2024, the skies above continued to provide undeniable beauty, especially in two eye-popping events: a long-anticipated total solar eclipse viewed by millions of North Americans on April 8, and a short-notice burst of solar storms in May, including one spectacular night of auroras seen over much of the planet on May 10.

Below are photos from a few of 2024’s noteworthy events in weather and climate, related policy and activism, and celestial phenomena.

Not so great in the Great Lakes: A winter of record-low ice coverage

The coastlines of the Great Lakes are typically ice-covered by February, but near-record warmth led to the least ice cover over the lakes since record keeping began in 1973. Instead of around 40 percent of the lake surface being frozen at the late-winter peak extent, as is typical, this year’s ice coverage peaked at only about 4 percent, as revealed in NASA satellite analyses.

A terrifyingly fast fire burns through a swath of the Southern Plains

The Smokehouse Creek Fire ripped across more than a million acres of Texas and Oklahoma late in the winter, with most of that spread occurring on February 26. The fire was by far the largest of 2024 in the United States, where wildfire had scorched 8,851,142 acres by Dec. 27, an extent 27 percent above the annual average from the past decade. In a March 26 post, Bob Henson examined new warning systems being developed on the Southern Plains that could advance wildfire safety nationwide.

Millions view the Great North American Eclipse of 2024

Some 50 million people – by design or happenstance – found themselves in the path of totality on April 8, 2024, when a solar eclipse tracked across some of North America’s most populous areas from midday to early afternoon. It was largely cloudy across parts of South Texas that climatology had deemed the most likely U.S. area to see clear skies – and mostly clear over parts of northern New England, where clouds were the most climatologically likely. Yet there were enough just-in-time breaks in many overcast areas (with some of those breaks perhaps the result of the eclipse itself) to allow a few peek-a-views of the sky show. A December 13 roundup in Science News spotlights some of the early findings from data gathered during the eclipse.

Greener than ever after a tornadic disaster

The southwest Kansas town of Greensburg found an innovative way to recover from an EF5 tornado that decimated the community and took 11 lives on May 4, 2007. The town worked with state and federal officials to implement green technologies as it rebuilt. Among the many accomplishments was the nation’s first-ever hospital to be certified as carbon-neutral. Photographer Charlie Randall went back to Greensburg this year for an Eye on the Storm post, exploring what residents thought of the big changes 17 years after the disastrous tornado.

Severe weather takes a hit on icons of renewable energy

Although a tornado could just as easily strike an oil well or a fracking pump as a wind turbine, recent images of turbines and solar panels damaged or destroyed by tornadoes, hail, and hurricanes have made it clear that renewable energy is not invulnerable to the effects of extreme weather. And as the Columbia Climate School reported in October, that extreme weather can include phenomena that are themselves influenced by climate change.

The auroral storms of May 2024 as seen by camera and naked eye

The sequence of solar storms that peaked on May 10, 2024, may have been the most widely photographed aurora in world history. However, folks who missed out should know that the in-person views weren’t as stunning as one might expect from many of the photos taken with modern cameras, including newer cellphones. The latest sensors can produce hyper-vivid images of auroras even though they may be only faintly visible or even invisible to human observers. In the case above, said LaDue, “It didn’t look that bright by eye. It was more like a faded recognition that the aurora was there.”

Helene hammers the U.S. Southeast

More than 225 people were killed in six states in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which made landfall as a Category 4 in the Florida Panhandle and then took a sharp left turn after Georgia. The storm dropped immense amounts of rain on already-saturated ground across the mountainous landscape in and around western North Carolina. Helene was the deadliest hurricane to affect the contiguous United States since Katrina in 2005 – though still falling well short of the catastrophic human toll inflicted by Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017 – and it is expected to end up as one of the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history. In an Eye on the Storm post of September 27, Jeff Masters pointed out four ways in which climate change likely made Helene worse. And a World Weather Attribution report of October 9 called climate change a “key driver of catastrophic impacts” from Helene.

On the heels of Helene, Milton causes fresh trouble

Just weeks after Hurricane Helene’s rampage, Hurricane Milton peaked as a Category 5 storm – the second-strongest hurricane on record in the Gulf of Mexico, with peak winds of 180 mph – before making landfall just south of Tampa as a weakening Category 3 hurricane. Milton took at least 35 lives, and according to Moody’s it inflicted an estimated $22 to 36 billlion USD in insured losses, with billions more going uninsured. Some of Milton’s potential damage was mitigated by building improvements put in place in the wake of 2022’s devastating Hurricane Ian – and by the fact that Helene had already taken a toll across some of the areas subsequently hit by Milton. As discussed in Eye on the Storm on October 11, Milton likely would have struck Florida as a Cat 2 versus Cat 3 in the absence of human-caused climate change.

An iconic peak in Japan feels the effects of record autumn warmth

After the region’s warmest October on record, Japan’s famed Mount Fuji made it to November 5 before receiving measurable snow. It was the latest date for the volcanic peak’s first autumn snow since records began 130 years ago. “Everyone feels strange not seeing snow in November,” Takefumi Sakaki, an official from Fujiyoshida City, told the New York Times. Just three days later, the mountain was again free of widespread snowpack, as reported by NASA.

A “river of cars” left by Valencia’s devastating flash flood

More than 230 people were killed and more than $3 billion USD in damage was inflicted by flash flooding across eastern Spain that peaked in the vicinity of Valencia on October 29. The flood, one of the worst weather disasters in Spain’s modern history, was produced by a stalled upper-level low and fueled by an unusually moist atmosphere, which in turn was fed by near-record sea surface temperatures over the Mediterranean. Torrential rains that fell just inland from Valencia sent floodwaters coursing through narrow streets and piled cars atop each other like matchsticks, including near a former riverbed that had been relocated after a disastrous 1957 flood. In an informal analysis, World Weather Attribution concluded that the heaviest rains behind the Valencia floods were made about twice as likely by climate change.

Achievement and disappointment at COP29

The United Nations’ 29th annual Conference of Parties meeting (COP29) ended with some key agreements, including a pledge by the world’s leading historical greenhouse-gas emitters to provide at least $300 billion USD per year by 2035 to help developing countries adapt to climate change. However, that pledge fell far short of a longtime goal to provide at least $1.3 trillion USD per year, which left many activists and front-line nations bitterly disappointed. See the in-depth report at Carbon Brief for more details on key COP29 outcomes.

Defenders of climate scientists gear up for a second Trump term

In November 2024, Donald Trump was elected to a non-consecutive second term as U.S. president. As Trump prepared to return to office, the nonprofit Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which provides free legal and educational support to researchers facing harassment and intimidation for their work, was gearing up for a high-stakes protracted struggle to protect scientists. For more details, see Jeff Masters’ Eye on the Storm interview of December 13 with the fund’s executive director, Lauren Kurtz. “We’re going to need another lawyer due to the already-increased demand,” Kurtz told Masters.