Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows.
As 2024 began, we’d just finished the most remarkable year in the planet’s modern climate history—2023 had shattered every global record for temperature, with researchers firm in the conviction that our planet had seen its hottest average temperatures in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. But, even as they watched the mercury soar, they weren’t completely sure why: temperatures seemed to be rising even before an El Niño warming in the Pacific fully kicked in. In a remarkably candid essay this March in Nature, NASA’s chief climatologist, Gavin Schmidt, said, “The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.” If temperatures hadn’t settled back to something more like a consistent rise by late summer 2024, he noted, that would imply “that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
In the event, this August was the warmest August on record, and most of the other months of 2024 also broke records; it now seems certain that, when meteorological officials announce their results early in January, this will again have been the hottest year ever measured. Scientists still can’t explain what’s causing the spike, which sits atop the steady ramp in temperature over the past few decades. As Schmidt said in an October interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, “it’s still pretty much, I would say, amateur hour in terms of assessing” what’s going on. The proffered explanations—the eruption of a submarine volcano in the South Pacific that put a lot of heat-trapping water vapor into the air, the phase-out of high-sulfur fuels in oceangoing ships that reduced heat-reflecting pollution—don’t seem large enough to account for what the thermometers are measuring; it’s possible that we may have tripped some switches we don’t understand in the global climate system.
What we do understand is bad enough. In September, Hurricane Helene swept across the Gulf of Mexico, turning from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane in barely more than a day—the kind of “rapid intensification” that researchers increasingly see as a hallmark of a warming ocean. It moved so fast that it carried the freight of rain that it picked up over the record-hot waters of the Gulf far inland; in the mountains just north of Asheville, radar estimates suggested rainfall totals of up to forty inches. That water inundated the cricks and hollows of southern Appalachia—the death toll from the storm sits at two hundred and forty-one (making it the deadliest to hit the U.S. since Maria devastated Puerto Rico, in 2017), and the economic damage is nearing a hundred billion dollars, making it one of the costliest storms since Katrina. But the pictures from a ravaged North Carolina looked an awful lot like pictures from devastated parts of southern Europe or northern Africa or Brazil or Southeast Asia—if you look on YouTube, you can find a near-daily flood of flood pictures, with floating cars careening down the streets of mountain towns.
There seems to be just one way left to even start to slow down that torrent, and that’s to rapidly replace coal, gas, and oil with sun, wind, and batteries—and if you’re trying to avoid existential despair, there are stories and numbers this year worth focussing on. Solar power expanded so rapidly in 2023 (eighty-six per cent up on 2022 worldwide) that some wondered whether the charge could continue this year; it did, with the best guess being we will see a further growth of nearly thirty per cent this year. We’ve clearly moved into the steep part of the S-curve of clean-energy expansion, where even the most optimistic forecasts are consistently surpassed, and at the moment we appear to be installing a gigawatt’s worth of photovoltaic panels (roughly the size of a nuclear power plant) every eighteen hours or so.
In California, which has been working on this transition more vigorously than most states, the combination of solar arrays and batteries reached some kind of tipping point this year: beginning in March, for up to ten hours a day over more than four months, the Golden State produced more than a hundred per cent of its electricity from renewable energy; when night fell, enormous new batteries, which had soaked up excess power all afternoon, often became the largest source of power supply on the state’s grid. Despite all the (warranted) concern about new data centers and artificial intelligence soaking up power, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson said a few weeks ago that his home state would use twenty-five per cent less natural gas to generate power this year than last. That’s a big number, big enough that if it were replicated in a lot of places, it would make a dent in the estimates of future warming.
Globally, so far, we haven’t quite hit the peak of fossil-fuel combustion—the latest data from early November predict that the world will burn a little less than one per cent more than last year. But California isn’t the only place demonstrating that another world is possible. Early this year, analysts started noticing something unusual in Pakistan: demand for electricity from the national grid was dropping sharply. Some sleuthing—including looking down from the sky via Google Earth—revealed the cause. Local businesspeople and farmers, annoyed by an expensive and unreliable electricity supply and lured by cheap Chinese solar panels, were covering the roofs of homes, factories, and stores with photovoltaic arrays. By the middle of the year, as the energy analysts Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren wrote, this silent solar revolution had seen Pakistanis erect the equivalent of thirty per cent of the national grid in six months. Farmers who depend on tube wells, which pull water from aquifers for irrigation and are often diesel-powered, were putting up panels, too; diesel sales in the country dropped thirty per cent. And something of the same magnitude, again driven by the incredibly inexpensive Chinese panels, seemed to be happening across much of southern Africa. In sunny Germany, meanwhile, where solar panels are now cheaper than wood fencing, at least half a million apartment dwellers hung them from their balconies.
If one’s hoping that this photovoltaic deus ex machina might change the outcome of the story, last month’s Presidential election is obviously a devastating plot twist. Donald Trump routinely used his stump speeches to proclaim climate change a hoax; if anything, he said, it might be a “good thing,” because “if I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property.” Sea-level rise actually reduces ocean frontage, but that’s the least of the problems with his assessment. The assumption is that his incoming Administration will do everything that the fossil-fuel industry (which raised record sums for his campaign) asks of him. (It already seems to be working to gut incentives to switch to electric vehicles, with the approval of Elon Musk, who apparently thinks that it will benefit Tesla more than Detroit; once Trump takes office expect an effort to boost America’s already world-leading exports of natural gas.) The clean-tech momentum that had begun to build in the U.S. as President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act went into effect will certainly be damped, though blue states from Washington to Massachusetts have announced big new initiatives in the days since the November vote.
Around the world, the effect is less certain. This year’s global climate talks just wrapped up inconclusively in Baku, the oil-soaked capital of Azerbaijan (whose President used his speech to the conclave to proclaim fossil fuels “a gift of god”). But with the U.S. presumably pulling out of the Paris accord yet again, China will clearly become the key player in the energy transition. There’s no clear sign yet as to what that means, but China is building about half the world’s renewable power.
The uncertainty about what’s coming next extends to some of the most basic systems on the planet—2024 saw a revival of concerns that the great currents of the Atlantic, which transport heat north from the Equator, could falter even in the next few years. If that happened, it would mean disaster for a much colder Europe, a much hotter tropics, and a much stormier intersection between the two. Meanwhile, fires deep in pristine parts of the Amazon reminded researchers that drought might be breaking down the majestic mechanism that moves water inland across the rain forest, and in the Antarctic there were signs that the melt of crucial glaciers was accelerating. There are only so many big critical systems on this planet, and all of them seem in chaotic flux.
Humanity got a better sense of context for those chaotic shifts in late September, when scientists released the most ambitious attempt ever to reconstruct the climate of the past half billion years. It showed that, at points across those epochs, the world had been considerably hotter than it is now—but nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is now. In the words of one of the study’s authors, “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about.” ♦
