A scorching heatwave is ravaging South and Southeast Asia, impacting hundreds of millions with its intense heat. With April temperatures shattering previous records, the region is witnessing extreme weather patterns, wildfires, and tragic heat-related deaths. Schools have been forced to close, agricultural production and storage of perishable foods have been disrupted, and the risk of heatstroke and other health problems has risen significantly.
The scientists attribute the heatwave to the diminishing influence of the 2023–2024 El Niño event, which started in July 2023.
Forest fires and heatstroke deaths in Bangladesh
Bangladesh has experienced increasingly extreme weather conditions in recent years, and April 2024 stands out as the hottest month since 1948, with average temperatures ranging from 40–42 degrees Celsius (104–107.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in over 80 percent of the country.
Climate journalist Rafiqul Montu posted on X (formerly Twitter):
Wildfires erupt amid extreme heat and dry conditions
There was a continuous #HeatWave in #Bangladesh throughout April '24. Bangladesh has never seen such a hot April before. @zoom_earth map showing the heat intensity of the last day of April. The Meteorological Department has said, the abnormal heat will continue even after April. pic.twitter.com/ABE01jqTJC
#Bangladesh is burning in #heatwave. Four rounds of #heatalert have been issued in the country. Educational institutions were closed for a few days. April broke the 76-year record for consecutive heat waves. The abnormal heat wave disrupts people's life. pic.twitter.com/WgI4Od9b2z
Typically in April, Bangladesh receives 130.2 millimetres of rain, however, this year, there was almost none. The government announced the closure of government schools affecting 33 million students nationwide, while private schools with better facilities transitioned to online education. In just one week of April, over 10 deaths across the country were attributed to heatstroke.
However, the most notable impact was the wildfires in different parts of the Sundarbans Reserve Forest, the world’s largest mangrove forest. Sundarbans is a remote area, lacking adequate firefighting resources nearby. The Forest Department, along with fire service personnel, local villagers, and other volunteers, could only start firefighting efforts 17 hours after the first fire. As of the time of writing this report, a significant portion of the huge fire in the Amurbunia area of the Chandpai range is still burning, posing a threat to its rich biodiversity.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
“The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal,” one campaigner said.
Oil major Shell announced $7.7 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2024 on Thursday, as well as a $3.5 billion share buyback program.
The news comes as every month covered by the period was the hottest of its kind on record. The three-month period also saw the second-largest wildfire in Texas history, extreme heat in West Africa and the Sahel, and the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef’s fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. Scientists have clearly linked global heating, and the weather disasters it exacerbates, to the climate crisis driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
“As extreme weather accelerates and the cost-of-living crisis rumbles on, Shell’s latest billion-pound profits are an affront to the world,” Izzie McIntosh, climate campaign manager at Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal.”
“This is the sad irony of the global energy system in which those causing chaos are the ones getting rich.”
Shell’s profits for the first three months of 2024 were around 20% lower than for the same time in 2023, CNBC reported. However, the company brought in $1.2 billion more than analysts had predicted. The world’s largest oil firms, including Shell, saw record profits in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis that followed.
“Shell has beaten expectations by a reasonable margin, despite the impact of lower gas prices during the first quarter,” Stuart Lamont, an investment manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said in a statement shared by CNBC.
Global Witness pointed out that Shell’s earnings to date amounted to over $58,000 a minute, more than the average U.K. nurse makes in a year.
“Shell continuing to rake in huge sums of money shows us that huge polluter profits were not a one-off but are the twisted reality of an energy system that benefits climate-wrecking companies to the cost of everyone else,” Global Witness fossil fuel campaigner Alexander Kirk said in a statement.
Shell announced its profits one day after the U.S. Senate held a hearing on how large oil and gas companies, including Shell, have continued to deceive the public about the dangers of their products, moving from outright climate denial into making commitments they don’t intend to keep or touting false solutions like carbon capture and storage that they then fail to develop. Shell, according to the testimony of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), spent only 11% of its capital on low-carbon technologies between 2009 and 2023.
The hearing sparked calls for accountability from the fossil fuel industry—such as mechanisms to make climate polluters pay for the transition to renewable energy—and the news of Shell’s profits generated more.
In the U.K., Labor Shadow Energy and Climate Minister Ed Miliband proposed increasing the tax on energy company profits. Shell paid the U.K. government around $1.4 billion in taxes in 2023, of which around $300 million went to the Energy Profits Levy, according toThe Guardian. Also last year, it paid its shareholders $23 billion, nine times more than it invested in its “Renewables and Energy Solutions” program.
“These results show yet again why it is so damning [that Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax on the oil and gas giants,” Miliband said. “These are companies that have made record profits at the expense of working people. Labor says tax these companies fairly so we can invest in clean homegrown energy that will end the cost of living crisis and make Britain energy independent.”
Greenpeace U.K. called Shell’s latest profits “shameless.”
“Their reckless hunt for profits needs to end,” the environmental advocacy group wrote on social media. “When will world leaders find their backbone and make polluters pay?”
When one commenter suggested governments held back out of desire to keep collecting Big Oil’s taxes, Greenpeace fired back, “What taxes?” and noted that Shell avoided paying U.K. taxes for years.
“At the end of the day we want clean, cheap renewable energy not to face the worst impacts of climate change,” Greenpeace continued. “Solutions exist, we just need the political and industrial will to get them in place.”
Global Witness and Global Justice Now also took the opportunity to call for an energy transition.
“This is the sad irony of the global energy system in which those causing chaos are the ones getting rich,” Kirk said. “This spiral won’t stop until we make the urgent switch to a fairer renewable energy system that puts both people and planet first.”
McIntosh concluded: “We urgently need to bring a fair and organised end to the fossil fuel era, and that means companies like Shell must stop trying to extract new oil and gas, and start paying what they owe for the loss and damage they’ve caused. Profit announcements like this for a corporate dinosaur like Shell need to become a thing of the past.”
Record-breaking rain over the past few months has left fields of crops under water and livestock’s health at risk, adding to pressures on food producers.
The flooding and extreme weather linked to climate change will undermine UK food production unless farmers get more help, the National Farmers Union said.
The NFU is calling on the government to do more to compensate flooded farmers and support domestic food production.
The government said it was looking to expand a new compensation scheme.
The NFU has warned of “substantially reduced output” and “potential hits” to the quality of crops in this year’s harvest thanks to weeks of rain since the autumn.
NFU vice president Rachel Hallos said UK farmers were “on the front line of climate change – one of the biggest threats to UK food security”.
“These extremes could soon become the norm,” she told the BBC. “We need a clear plan from government to prepare, adapt and recover from our changing climate in the short and long term so that we can continue to produce food and care for the countryside.”
Since June 2023, every month has been the “hottest ever” on record. Image: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/empics/picture alliance.
The past 10 months have all been the hottest on record. The average global temperature in March was 1.68 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average.
Last month was 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous March, and 1.68 degrees Celsius hotter than an average March between the years 1850-1900, the reference period for the pre-industrial era.
Above-average temperatures were recorded in parts of Africa, South America, Greenland and Antarctica. Sea surface temperatures also hit a “shocking new high,” the report said.
Hottest 12-month period
The average temperature for the 12-month period ending in March was 1.58 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average, making it the warmest 12-month period on record.
This record warmth does not necessarily mean that global temperatures have broken the 1.5-degree limit set by world leaders in Paris in 2015 as such measurements are taken in decades rather than individual years, but it does show a general trend in that direction.
“It’s the long-term trend with exceptional records that has us very concerned,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S told Reuters news agency.
“Seeing records like this — month in, month out — really shows us that our climate is changing, is changing rapidly,” she added.
Climate change and its effects have been seen across the globe. This year itself, Venezuela saw a record number of wildfires, and southern Africa has faced drought conditions. Warm waters in the southern hemisphere are causing a mass coral bleaching event.
A journalist reports from the Santa Ana wind-driven Bond Fire burning near a hillside residence along Santiago Canyon Road in Silverado, California on December 3, 2020. (Photo: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“We need more climate journalism, not less,” said one Media Matters for America writer.
Last year featured not only what scientists worldwide confirmed was the hottest year in human history but also a 25% drop in corporate broadcast networks’ coverage of the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, according to an analysis released Thursday.
Media Matters for America, which has long tracked television networks’ climate coverage, reviewed transcripts and video databases for ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox Broadcasting Co. The watchdog found that in 2023, despite the worsening global crisis, the networks collectively had just 1,032 minutes of coverage, down from 1,374 minutes in 2022 and 1,316 minutes in 2021.
That amounts to less than 1% of all corporate broadcast coverage aired last year, notes the analysis authored by Media Matters senior writer Evlondo Cooper with contributions from Allison Fisher, director of the group’s climate and energy program.
“Last year’s extreme climate events further illustrated the need for consistent, substantive, and wide-ranging news coverage about all facets of climate change.”
They wrote that “discussion of extreme weather events aired during 37% of coverage, or 160 out of 435 segments. June through September saw the most severe extreme weather events and accounted for just over 54% of total coverage.”
“Only 12% of climate segments on corporate broadcast news, or 52 out of 435, mentioned ‘fossil fuels,'” the pair pointed out. “This is a slight increase from 2022, when ‘fossil fuels’ were mentioned in only 8% of climate segments.”
“Solutions or actions that may be taken in response to climate change were mentioned in 22% of climate segments,” they highlighted. That ended an upward trend: 29% in 2020, 31% in 2021, and 35% in 2022.
Cooper and Fisher also noted that climate scientists made up 10% of featured guests, compared with just 4% in 2022; “white men dominated the demographics of guests featured in climate segments” for the seventh year straight; and discussions of climate justice appeared in only 5% of coverage, up from 3% the previous year.
Looking at only the “Big Three” of the television world—ABC, CBS, and NBC—they found that climate coverage dropped 23% for morning news programs and 36% for nightly shows. CBS aired 42% of all climate coverage while ABC had the least of the trio and NBC had the biggest decrease from 2022.
For the review of Sunday morning political shows, the researchers included Fox. They found that in 102 combined minutes of airtime across 26 segments, CBS again led the pack—it was the only network that increased coverage, from 20 minutes in 2022 to 66 minutes, or over half the total, in 2023.
The analysis recognizes a “significant decline” in coverage of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat the climate emergency, explaining:
This reduction in corporate broadcast news attention occurred during a critical period for climate policy implementation, particularly of the Inflation Reduction Act, which continued to drive positive outcomes in the clean energy market, and new regulations announced during COP28 to curb methane emissions. Despite these significant actions, corporate broadcast networks’ focus on the administration’s climate initiatives was limited.
COP28, the United Nations’ annual climate summit near the end of the year, also received “very limited” coverage from the networks, the report says. The conference—which scientists called “a tragedy for the planet” because its final agreement didn’t demand a global fossil fuel phaseout—was mentioned in just 14 segments, accounting for 3% of climate coverage.
As Common Dreams has reported, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that in addition to being the hottest year on record, 2023 also had 28 U.S. disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, which collectively cost at least $92.9 billion.
“Last year’s extreme climate events further illustrated the need for consistent, substantive, and wide-ranging news coverage about all facets of climate change,” Cooper and Fisher wrote. “Effective reporting should incorporate a wide range of voices during coverage of extreme weather events, major climate studies, and policy decisions; when applicable, coverage should expose systemic issues that contribute to disproportionate climate impacts; and climate coverage must consistently report not only the impacts of climate change but the drivers of global warming and the solutions that move us away from fossil fuel dependence.”
In a social media post promoting the new analysis, Cooper concluded that “we need more climate journalism, not less.”
