Aftermath of Cyclone Chido, Mayotte
by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations
If an unexpected leap in the global average temperature in 2023 was described by one scientist as “gobsmackingly bananas”, are there even words to talk about 2024?
This year, Death Valley hit 54.5°C and India 48.9°C during an April–May heatwave. More than 1,300 Hajj pilgrims died in Saudi Arabia as Mecca reached 51.8°C. September brought record-breaking rainfall to central Europe, with disruption costing billions of euros. Devastating floods hit Brazil and Kenya. 2024 ended with a tropical cyclone demolishing the French colony of Mayotte, completely or partly destroying over 35,000 houses.
It was a year when the global average temperature record was broken (again!), and the international climate policy-making charade suffered its own breakdown in Baku. Here are some of the big stories.
Scientists shocked, again, as 2024 climbs to 1.6°C
When the final figures are in, the average global warming for 2024 will be around 1.6°C. The previous record of around 1.5°C set in 2023 was in part ascribed to an El Niño event that had faded by April 2024. Expectations were that 2024 would not be as hot as 2023, but it was another year of scientific shock and awe. In August Prof. Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute, acknowledged that “the planet is changing faster than expected… we must admit we have underestimated risks”.
There had been uncertainty about what caused 2023 to be around 0.25°C hotter than model projections, with contenders including the El Nino and decreased cooling from sulfate aerosols due to cleaner shipping fuels mandated by the International Maritime Organisation from 2020. [Sulfates are a by-product of burning fossil fuels, assist cloud formation and have a strong but short-lived cooling impact.]
In late 2024, new research pointed to another factor: reduced cloud cover. In December, Helge F. Goessling and his colleagues found that the extra heat was a product of a decline in Earth’s reflectivity caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, and was a continuation of a multi-annual trend. Possible factors were “internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback”.
There is an observed acceleration in decadal warming from 0.2°C to 0.3°C since 2010. Climate models do not deal adequately with cloud dynamics, and this step-up in the rate of warming may persist, as James Hansen and his co-authors have suggested in “Global warming in the pipeline”. For all practical purposes, Earth has reached 1.5°C, with 2°C likely in the early 2040s.
AMOC disruption gets real
Perhaps the biggest story of 2024 is the growing alarm about the risk of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapse by mid-century. The AMOC stretches from pole to pole, and amongst other things transfers a large amount of heat from the tropical region to the North Atlantic, making weather in north-east America and north-west Europe much milder than it would otherwise be.
AMOC has already slowed by 15%, and an abrupt collapse would be catastrophic. Prof. Peter Ditlevsen says it would be a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture. AMOC collapse would result in the West Africa and South Asia monsoons becoming unreliable, a one-metre sea level rise on both sides of the North Atlantic, Australia becoming warmer and more prone to flooding, a flip of the wet and dry seasons in the Amazon, and as much as half of the world’s viable area for growing corn and wheat could dry out. “In simple terms [it] would be a combined food and water security crisis on a global scale,” says Prof. Tim Lenton.
A July 2023 study had estimated “a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions”, with a 95% probability of it occurring between 2025 and 2095. In November 2024 new work showed that meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic is weakening ocean circulation. And a paper now in publication estimates the probability of an AMOC collapse before the year 2050 to be 59±17%.
A full breakdown of AMOC could happen within a few decades, says AMOC specialist Stefan Rahmstorf. A good summary of the AMOC story is Bob Henson’s “How much should you worry about a collapse of the Atlantic conveyor belt?”.
The old policy-making paradigm is dying
In Baku, Azerbaijan the 29th climate Conference of the Parties (COP), UN Secretary-General António Guterres remarked that “Humanity’s torching the planet and paying the price.” After 29 meetings of the global climate-policy-making COPs, emissions are still increasing, the rate of warming is accelerating and crucial tipping points and planetary boundaries have already been breached. Delegates talk about “keeping 1.5 alive” when we are already there and heading for 3°C or more; “net” zero 2050 means delay and “not” zero; and carbon capture and storage is a never-ending cargo cult beloved by the oil giants. Like soccer World Cups, hosting climate talks seems to have become key business for petrostates, and the old policy-making paradigm is dying.
Key experts including former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson say that COP climate talks are “no longer fit for purpose” and need an urgent overhaul.
The reason is simple: at these UN-style events, every state has a veto over outcomes, and since petrostates and big oil have become even more blatant in expressing their intention to expand production, they are killing off progress on climate mitigation. And major fossil fuel companies are backtracking on their climate pledges. Petrostates and big oil are on the offensive and their political shock troops — climate-denying and authoritarian governments — are steering a course towards climate-driven societal collapse.
The world’s energy-related CO2 emissions in 2023 increased to a new record high, despite clean energy growth. The world has not yet started to decarbonise in absolute terms because lower emissions from electricity use are being offset by growth in other areas of energy use. Essentially, the big picture is that renewables are covering growth in energy demand, not yet substituting for the existing fossil-fuel-based supply.
The biggest culprit in growing energy demand is Silicon Valley and the digital boom with its ravenous appetite for power for cloud computing and data centres, for AI and for crypto. Data centre emissions for Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are probably 662% higher than big tech claims. The Guardian reports that: “a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search, and data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030”. One example is a new data centre in the US state of Georgia being built by the Blackstone-backed QTS that will use as much electricity as about one million US homes.
That’s one part of a much larger picture, described by Bloomberg: “Big tech companies need lots of electricity, for data centers and especially for artificial intelligence…. and when faced with this sudden increase of load on the power grid, utilities are going to rely heavily on natural gas, and even coal.” One analyst says US demand for electricity will climb almost 16% over the next five years, more than triple his estimate a year ago.
Creeping climate costs: Food and insurance
“Cost of living pressures, beating inflation” is today’s political bread-and-butter, though little is admitted as to the causes: growing inequality driven by four decades of neoliberalism, housing and tax failure on a grand scale, and systemic disruptions such as Covid. Should foodflation be added to the list?
At the Baku COP, UN climate chief Simon Stiell warned that “the climate crisis is a cost-of-living crisis… and worsening climate impacts will “put inflation on steroids” and that “right now, today, in this political cycle… climate impacts are carving up to 5% off GDP in many countries”.
Carbon Brief has provided five very useful charts on how climate change is driving up food prices around the world. And insurance giant Lloyds calculates the odds that extreme weather will lead to a global food shock and their “severe” scenario was estimated to cost $5.7 trillion over a five-year period with a 28% chance over 30 years. The “extreme” case was estimated to cause $17.6 trillion in damage with a 9% chance over 30 years, and would meet the UN’s definition of a global catastrophic risk event: one that kills over 10 million people.
Researchers say that “extreme weather in 2022 alone is estimated to have added nearly 1% to food inflation in Europe, while as much as a third of recent UK food inflation is estimated to come from climate impacts”.
And then there is insurance, where costs are rising rapidly due to extreme climate impacts, or it is no longer available. The Australia Institute says that the average home insurance premium in Australia in 2022 rose by 14% over the previous year, the biggest rise in a decade, and that “major floods in eastern Australia pushed insured losses in 2022 to a record $7 billion, almost double previous records”.
In the USA, insurers are deserting homeowners as climate shocks worsen, reports the New York Times: “Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.” And in 2024, Swiss Re, one of Europe’s largest reinsurers, said insurers have dramatically underestimated the damages from climate-related disasters and warned that some areas of the continent may become “uninsurable.”
The insurance problem will become systemic. Five years ago the analyst Spencer Glendon told an investment conference:
“The problem is that Florida’s economy is built on 30-year debt… underwritten by annual insurance. The condition of having a mortgage is that you have insurance, but the problem is that while the mortgage people offer you 30 years, the insurance people only offer you one. There will be no insurance in lots of Florida quite soon… as Florida gets wetter and saltier and hotter and and more volatile, insurance markets will dry up.”
So when will Florida’s economy fall apart? Glendon says “it’s not when it’s under water, it’s when people stop lending 30-year money. And when that happens, everything will go with it.”
