India on Wednesday said 2024 was its hottest year since 1901, while Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said on Thursday that the past year marked its second-warmest year since records began in 1910.
Warmer air can hold more water vapour, and warmer oceans mean greater evaporation, resulting in more intense downpours and storms.
The United Nations said in a year-end message on Monday that 2024 was set to be the warmest year ever recorded worldwide.
China is the leading emitter of the greenhouse gases scientists say are driving global warming, though Beijing has pledged that carbon dioxide emissions will peak by 2030 and be brought to net zero by 2060.
Dozens killed
Dozens of people were killed and thousands evacuated during floods around the country last year.
But Xue Weiya, an IT worker in Beijing, told AFP he believed “the Chinese government is doing a very good job of protecting the environment, so I don’t think the weather… will have a big impact on us”.
In central Beijing, finance professional Xu Yici lamented that warmer-than-usual weather had affected the city’s traditional winter pastime of ice skating.
Natural disasters caused $310 billion in economic losses in 2024, Zurich-based insurance giant Swiss Re has said.
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“There’s no ice in the Summer Palace. I was going to go ice skating at the Summer Palace, but I didn’t get to do it this year,” Xu told AFP.
Last year was China’s warmest on record, its weather agency said, as the world experiences a surge in extreme weather fuelled by climate change.
The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—and to 1.5C if possible.
