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By Akshat Rathi Each year at Bloomberg Green we brace for the start of the Northern Hemisphere summer. While many people think about their holidays, we ready ourselves to write about the increasingly wild weather unleashed on an overheating planet. Yet 2024 has already been an exceptional year for climate impacts – and it’s only June. What we’ve seen so far has been “stunning,” Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, said on the Zero podcast.
On the latest episode of Zero, Texas Tech University professor Katharine Hayhoe explains why we’re all experiencing “global weirding.” Let’s start in Hayhoe’s home of Texas, which she calls the “poster child of extreme weather” in the US. The state sees more billion-dollar damage from climate-linked disasters than any other. In February the worst wildfire in Texas history scorched more than 1 million acres. Last month, Texas experienced extreme heat, hail, and tornados. At the same time, local leaders in the oil state say they are worried about ensuring continued fossil fuel investment. (Though Texas hasn’t gone as far as climate-vulnerable Florida, which is making it the law to ignore global warming when creating government policies.)
A resident collects belongings from his vehicle after riding out a tornado in the bathrooms of a truck stop in Valley View, Texas, on May 26, 2024. Photographer: Julio Cortez/AP
Global temperatures are now, on average, 1.3C above pre-industrial times and many parts of the world are just trying to survive through this new climate reality. Zambia, a country of 20 million people with less than $1,500 of annual income per capita, is suffering through one of its worst droughts in four decades. That’s caused the production of corn to fall to a 16-year low and forced the country to seek $900 million in humanitarian aid. It’s not the only nation where climate has become a severe economic threat: This year’s heat also badly wilted Pakistani cotton, which forms the basis of the country’s giant textile manufacturing industry.
A burnt ear of corn during a heat wave. Photographer: Hector Quintanar/Bloomberg
Major cities have had to grapple with completely unexpected catastrophes. Dubai is a megacity in a desert country that gets so little rain the nation has regularly turned to cloud-seeding to generate precipitation. The oil-producing country was caught off guard by devastating floods in April, made worse by climate change, which destroyed Ferraris and forced the government to pledge $544 million for home repairs.
A Ferrari sportscar in a showroom damaged by floodwater following heavy rains in Dubai on April 19, 2024. Photographer: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg
The daily high temperature in New Delhi, the capital of my home country, hasn’t gone below 40C (104F) in over a month. The nation’s longest and most extreme heat wave has killed dozens of people over the past few months. Some of those were poll workers, because the extreme temperatures coincided with a national election where 600 million people turned out to vote. The new government cabinet includes a former coal minister who will be tasked with helping India hit its renewable energy targets. (Oil-rich Mexico also saw record heat during its national election, which resulted in climate and energy scientist Claudia Sheinbaum winning the presidency.)
People gather around a municipal tanker to collect water during high temperatures in New Delhi on May 18, 2024. Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg
Global warming has dramatically altered everything from the sea to the sky – as this year’s mass coral bleaching event and reports of extreme turbulence show. And things are set to get worse because our fossil fuel-powered lives aren’t slowing down and the amount of planet-warming gas in the atmosphere keeps rising as a result. In some cases, extreme weather is actually increasing our desire for these polluting fuels. Egypt’s extreme heat wave has led the gas-rich country to import liquefied natural gas to keep all of its air conditioners humming. In other cases, attempts to move away from fossil fuel production are causing short-term shortages. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has made fighting climate change a priority and has refused to grant licenses to explore for new oil and gas sites. That means, for now, the country is having to meet its demand for gas through more expensive imports. Going through the seemingly never-ending list of extreme weather events that have occurred just in the last 12 months, I realized that I’m not capable of processing the scale of devastation. A troubling realization dawned on me: In the time it would take to make any reasonable attempt, new and worse catastrophes would no doubt have occurred. It’s the same conclusion Hayhoe came to when we talked: “We are going to see events that are even more extreme.” Akshat Rathi is the author of Climate Capitalism that will be out in paperback this month.
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