How global warming smashed all safety barriers in 2024

How do we feel the effects of climate change in our everyday lives? It could be in the form of the intense heat wave that swept through Delhi in the summer. On 29 May, the daytime temperature read 52.3 degrees Celsius on one of the city’s temperature stations, before the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) announced that the sensor had malfunctioned.

Or it may be the way that scientist Minal Pathak watched on in horror as eastern Spain was swamped by a deadly flood in late October. It may also be the way that economist Ulka Kelkar was shocked to see her garden dying one day at a time, as Bengaluru endured months of drought at the beginning of the year.

“I used to joke that I live in the safest city because it is cool, it doesn’t get hot. There are no rivers, so nothing will flood. There are no earthquakes unlike in north India or Delhi. And there are no cyclones because it’s inland,” says Kelkar, who is the executive programme director of Climate, Economics and Finance at World Resources Institute (WRI) India. “Then rains just didn’t come for months at a time, and I remember being actually scared.”

The ways climate change impacts the lives of people can be very different, but in 2024—a fateful year in the climate crisis—these impacts were everywhere, from polling agents dying of heatstroke during the Lok Sabha elections to hundreds of people killed in landslides in Kerala’s Wayanad during the monsoon. And that’s just in India.

If there was a theme for 2024, it was that climate disasters became a commonplace, like the dawn of a new era of instability. For Pathak, a faculty member at Ahmedabad University’s Global Centre for Environment and Energy, it would seem that we have normalised this instability.

“People just get on with their lives, and that’s not nice”, she says, putting the onus of this forgetfulness on the fact that in India, we tend to focus on “seasonal climate conversations”—like heat waves during summer, and floods during the monsoon. Probably, that’s why our response is not keeping pace with the rate at which climate impacts are increasing and intensifying. “There is no appetite for conversations on embedding structural change, where we are actually incorporating the lessons that we learn from these events. We’re basically not learning,” says Pathak.

The hottest year ever

If there is no learning, it isn’t for a lack of evidence. For starters, 2024 is almost certain to be the hottest year on record. And that too by a wide margin. In the previous hottest year, 2023, the average global temperature was 1.45 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) average. Once the full year’s data is in next month, 2024 would certainly be over 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times, and probably over 1.6 degrees hotter.

These are unprecedented numbers because the global aim is to limit atmospheric warming to a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. And though breaching the 1.5-degree mark in 2024 is probably temporary, the sooner the world reaches this mark on a permanent basis, the harder it will be to bring it back down by the end of the century.

“It’s almost inevitable that we reach it (break the 1.5 warming barrier) by the end of this decade, or early next decade,” says climate scientist Aditi Mukherji, who, like Pathak, has been a lead author on climate reports made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate science body. “Globally, there’s a policy inertia. It’s very puzzling as a scientist to wonder what more evidence do our policymakers actually need to take action?” says Mukherji, who is director, Climate Change Impact Area Platform, CGIAR.

As a famous, agenda-setting, IPCC report from 2018—known colloquially as the “1.5 degree Report”—made very clear: every fractional degree of warming over the 1.5 degree barrier will result in progressively worse climate impacts. The hard stop to heating, which is capped by the 2015 Paris Agreement to a rise of 2 degrees Celsius, is also too much. If the world heats up by that much by the end of the century, it would mean the decimation of all coral reefs, deadlier storms, highly variable monsoon rainfall, long and intense heat waves, a nearly ice-and-snow free Himalaya, and perennial rivers like the Ganga turning into seasonal ones. In short, climate patterns would be stripped of all sense of stability and predictability, a situation that human beings have never encountered.

Many of those climate impacts are already evident now, and you just have to read the news to see how the so-called “once-in-a-hundred-years” weather anomalies are now occurring every year, all over the world. The global climate is in a manic state of everything everywhere all at once. The latest catastrophe in a year of those was the devastating Cyclone Chido, which pretty much flattened the Southeastern African archipelago of Mayotte last week, leaving thousands dead.

Both the human as well as the financial cost of climate change is rising. According to a report published on 5 December by the Switzerland-based insurance firm Swiss Re, extreme climate events caused global economic losses of $320 billion in 2024. This is 6% higher than 2023, and 25% higher than the average of the previous 10 years.

Boiling oceans, rising CO2

One of the main reasons why climate impacts are going through the roof is that the global ocean is the hottest it has ever been after absorbing 90% of the excess heat trapped by fossil fuel emissions over the past 50 years. According to Nasa data, the ocean has absorbed 360zJ (zettajoules) of energy since 1955 (the equivalent of 25 billion atomic bombs). The Indian Ocean has been absorbing heat trapped by greenhouse gases (GHGs) at the rate of 4.5zJ a decade. The effects of the boiling seas are finally spilling out over land.

Climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune led a pioneering study this year examining the effects of the overheated Indian Ocean on South and Southeast Asia. The research found that the Indian Ocean has warmed at a rate of 0.12 degrees Celsius per decade from 1950-2020, and warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are supercharging cyclones and extreme rainfall across the region (Cyclone Chido being the latest case in point).

But this is also increasing heat waves over land like we experienced between March and June this year. Koll says that a warmer ocean starts a physical process that results in the subsidence or sinking of hot, dry air over the surrounding land. This leads to “heat domes” in the lower atmosphere. “The global change is affecting us more, the Indian Ocean region, which is tropical, and surrounded by ocean. The impact of this unpredictable weather is also much more on us,” he adds.

In April, as intense heat waves swept across the entire Indian Ocean rim, Koll labelled the Indo-Pacific region a “frying pan”. “The Indo-Pacific is one of the most vulnerable regions in terms of extreme events in recent times, whether it is rains or tropical storms and heatwaves and other impacts. We need urgent action in terms of emissions mitigation and local adaptation, and that is not happening,” he says.

And yet, while climate is tilting into the red, the urgently-needed mitigation of carbon emissions is not on track. Where the world needs to be on a steeply declining curve of reliance on oil, gas and coal, global production is in fact ratcheting up.

According to The Energy Institute’s (a global professional body for the energy sector) annual Statistical Review Of World Energy, published in June 2023, global fossil fuel consumption reached a record high, up 1.5% from the previous year. Planet-heating emissions too increased to a record high, exceeding 40gt (gross tonnage) of CO2 equivalent for the first time in history.

While renewable energy sources are also growing at a faster rate than ever before, increased production in oil and other fossil fuels means that the world’s “carbon budget” to stay within safe heating parameters is fast eroding. According to the Global Carbon Project (GCP), an organisation comprising independent scientists, the amount of fossil fuels that the world can burn and still have a hope of staying under 1.5 degrees of heating will run out in six years. But this amount is limited to existing fossil fuel sources, not new ones.

Show me the money

The GCP’s estimates for 2024 find India to be among the highest emitters, with GHG emissions rising by over 4% from 2023. It also forecasts a slight decrease for the US and a significant reduction from the European Union. While India is the world’s third-highest emitter of GHG (after China and the US), the historical blame for climate change rests on the cumulative emissions of the US and other rich countries.

And while India too needs to decarbonize (our goal is to reach net zero emissions by 2070), it will have to juggle this with the priority of meeting the basic needs of a majority of its citizens. It is not an easy tightrope to walk, and to facilitate this, India, like other developing countries, need the industrialised nations to fund the transition.

In that respect, 2024 was something of a fiasco. Back in 2009, admitting their historical role in causing the climate crisis, rich nations promised to pay developing countries $100 billion annually from 2020. This fund would primarily help developing nations progress while decarbonising. The actual money delivered fell woefully short of this goal.

The global climate summit, COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November, was hyped as the ‘finance COP’. Before this year’s summit, developing nations demanded a guarantee of aid worth $1.3 trillion per year by 2030. A major part of this would have to be in the form of low-cost grants. At the summit, richer nations pushed back, ultimately agreeing to just $300 billion a year by 2035, under the new collective quantified goals (NCQG) framework, and that too in a way that risks exacerbating the debt burdens of recipient nations. The declaration was lambasted by the India delegation.

The deal was described as “the final nail in the coffin of 1.5 degrees Celsius” to Mint by Vaibhav Chaturvedi, senior fellow at the climate policy think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). “Accelerating mitigation actions without the required means of implementation is only a fool’s dream,” he says.

While speaking to Mint for this story, Chaturvedi analyses what would have been the thinking behind this decision by rich countries. He feels that they don’t want to repeat the mistake of owning up to their historical burden, as they did in the drafting of the Paris Agreement.

Article 9.1 of the agreement states that developed countries “shall” provide financial assistance for mitigation and adaptation. Chaturvedi notes that subsequently, developed countries have mostly avoided any mention of 9.1, instead referring to 9.3, which states that developed countries “should” take the lead in providing finance.

“The finance debate is always 9.3, and they’re using it very cleverly because everybody knows that this demand for money could be endless, since need-based assessment will continue to emerge from the developing world as well as independent agencies,” he says.

Chaturvedi adds that going forward there will be further negotiations on this, acrimonious ones. “Because there is so much pressure on them. They will continue to give money, but the money will never be anywhere close to what is the real requirement.”

The road ahead

So what does a country like India do to access the required finance for mitigation? One likely door that was opened by COP29 was the route of carbon credits. In a headline announcement, the COP notified the international rules governing the buying and selling of carbon credits, ending years of deadlock over Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which governs carbon credits trading.

Kelkar says that the rules were long overdue, and that once the finer technical details are sorted in 2025, it should bridge the gap between ease of use and the integrity of the trading process. “Now it has reached a stage where you have a template for the standard methodology that projects can follow. You can’t just do your own calculations. Now, the same standard could be applied to a project in, say wind power, or can be applied to a project on a metro transport. Both of them are forms of emissions reduction,” she says.

And this means opportunities for Indian businesses. Kelkar points out that there will now be three distinct, but related markets in which Indian project developers can sell carbon credits—the voluntary market, an Indian market (which the Bureau of Energy Efficiency is in the process of developing), and the international market.

She also notes that the union government has already published a white paper on sectors in which private players can sell credits, while reserving others in which the country will claim credits against its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) towards mitigation under the Paris agreement. By the end of the coming year, the carbon credit market may well become a viable means of securing funding.

2025 is also the year when countries will have to update their NDCs in line with the need for deeper cuts in global emissions. Current NDCs are not enough, as sticking to them would result in a 2.9 degrees Celsius rise in heat by 2100. Chaturvedi feels that the buzz around fresh NDCs will help create political momentum in time for next year’s COP, to be held in Brazil.

Pathak is hoping for a meaningful update to India’s NDC, one that balances the country’s need to grow and energy transition. “We are on a development trajectory, so 20 years down the line, we don’t want to try and reverse some of our present decisions that lead to lock-ins. We already have a net zero target, let’s put some meat on that with more specifics, and involve other prospective stakeholders, like the private sector,” she says.

Koll was invited to be a part of a National Disaster Management Authority’s (NDMA) heatwave planning meeting early this year. There will be one next year too, making him hopeful that India is starting to take a more proactive role in preparing for climate impacts. “By March, April, the heatwave season will kick off. There is some vision and momentum, but what I’m wishing for in 2025 and ahead is that we scale it up and do it at a faster pace,” he says.

Koll is also working on a pilot project to predict health impacts of climate change by region, so that health departments can plan ahead and save lives.

Mukherji and Pathak are both part of the next round of IPCC reports, the process for which has begun. While Mukherji is hoping for a more solutions-focused slant to the next round of reports, Pathak is looking forward to working on a special report on climate solutions for cities.

“I think we have to differentiate between the high level international COP issues and national level discussions on mitigation and adaptation,” says Pathak. Mukherji is of a similar view. “The onus is on us Global South researchers to generate studies specific to our regions,” she says, with a focus on policy solutions.

Just like all international economic decisions, any light at the end of the tunnel on climate action will only be determined by narrative momentum and tenacious politics. “I think the real job of these (COP) negotiations is to give signals to the market—‘Net Zero’ was a terrific signal,” says Chaturvedi. “When it comes to negotiations, it’s fine if big formal agreements don’t come out of it. If good messaging comes out, that would be great.”