2024 was China hottest year on record: Weather agency
The weather bureau in China said it was the hottest year in its history last year because the planet is experiencing an explosion of severe weather caused by global warming.
China is the biggest source of the greenhouse gases scientists believe are warming the planet, but Beijing has already vowed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2030 and to zero by 2060.
National temperature for 2024 was 10.92 degrees Celsius (51.66 Fahrenheit), 1.03 degrees above the average -- "the warmest year since the beginning of full records in 1961", China Meteorological Administration said on its news website Wednesday night.
"The last four years were the warmest ever and the last 10 years since 1961 were in the 21st century," it continued. This year already has China recorded its warmest July in the record of observations, its hottest August and its warmest autumn.
The year 2024 was on track to be the warmest in global history, the United Nations said in a year-end message on Monday.
2024 is the hottest year since 1901, India said Wednesday, and the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia said Thursday that 2024 was the second-warmest year since 1910.
Global warming — which stems in part from fossil-fuel burning — is more than just temperature increase, but the spillover effect of all that extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans.
The hotter the air, the more vapour there can be, and the warmer the oceans – and the more water it can evaporate, causing more downpours and storms.
The effects are broad, fatal and growing in price, and wreckage properties and destroy food crops. A finance expert in Beijing’s capital city Xu Yici complained that abnormally hot weather had ruined the traditional winter pastime of ice skating in the capital.
"There is no ice in the Summer Palace. I was going to go ice skating in the Summer Palace, but I did not this year," Xu told AFP. Tens of thousands were killed and thousands evacuated in floods throughout the country last year.
One highway in southern China caved in after days of rain, killing 48 people in May.
Locals in southern Guangzhou were hit by a long summer, and state media said 240 days in which average temperatures exceeded 22C (71.6F) were recorded, a record from 1994 when 234 days were recorded.
Heat and drought sabotaged early autumn in Sichuan, Chongqing and the middle Yangtze River basin.
But Beijing-based IT worker Xue Weiya told AFP he thought "the Chinese government is really good at protecting the environment so I don’t think the weather... will be that big of a deal for us".
Across the world, 2024 was a year of lethal floods in Spain and Kenya, many terrible storms in the US and the Philippines, and deadly drought and wildfires in South America.
Ecological catastrophes drove economic damage of $310 billion in 2024, the Swiss insurance giant Swiss Re says.
The Paris climate agreements of 2015 would keep global warming at or below two degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels – and even 1.5C, if possible. The average surface air temperature in January-September jumped 1.54C over the pre-industrial average (1850-1900), the World Meteorological Organization reported in November.
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