A man walks on a hot summer day in Srinagar, India-controlled Kashmir, July 25, 2024
SCIENTISTS say four billion people — about half the world’s population — experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat from May 2024 to May 2025 because of human-caused climate change.
The extreme heat caused illness, death, crop losses and strained energy and healthcare systems, according to the analysis from World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross.
“Although floods and cyclones often dominate headlines, heat is arguably the deadliest extreme event,” the report said.
Many heat-related deaths are unreported or are mislabelled by other conditions like heart disease or kidney failure.
The study shows how much climate change boosted temperatures in an extreme heat event and calculated how much more likely its occurrence was because of climate change.
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Damaged structures and homes are seen after the Palisades fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 11, 2025. (Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
“Their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it’s not a problem,” said one meteorologist.
On the heels of the news that higher-than-average temperatures continued globally in April, one of the United States’ top science agencies announced Thursday that it will no longer update a database that tracks climate disasters that cause billions of dollars in damage.
As of Thursday, the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) website was replaced with a message saying there have been no such events in 2025 through April 8.
That flies in the face of an analysis by the National Centers for Environmental Information, which has maintained the database and said before it was taken down that six to eight billion-dollar climate disasters have happened so far this year, including the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January and caused an estimated $150 billion in damage.
The World Weather Attribution said in late January that planetary heating, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, caused weather conditions in Southern California that made the fires 35% more likely.
Hundreds of people have been laid off from NOAA in recent weeks as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, has pushed to slash government spending, and those who have lost their jobs include scientists who helped maintain the database.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster told The Washington Post that in addition to staff changes, “evolving priorities” were also partially behind the retiring of the database, which will now show disasters that occurred only between 1980-2024.
Between 2020-24, the number of billion-dollar disasters averaged 23 per year, compared to just a few per year in the 1980s.
“This Trump administration move is the dumbest magic trick possible: covering their eyes and pretending the problem will go away if they just stop counting the costs. Households across the country already have to count these costs at their kitchen table as they budget for higher insurance costs and home repairs. Families and retirees dipping into their savings or going bankrupt to recover from wildfires and hurricanes know what disasters cost,” said Carly Fabian, senior insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen’s Climate Program. “Hiding the national tallies will only undermine our ability to prepare and respond to the climate crisis. Deleting the data will exacerbate the devastating delays in acting to slow climate change, and the impacts it is having on property insurance and housing costs.”
NOAA’s “evolving priorities” have also included decommissioning other datasets, including one tracking marine environments and one tracking ocean currents.
Without NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, Jeremy Porter, co-founder of the climate risk financial modeling firm First Street, told CNN that “replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models.”
“What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and nonpublic data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers,” he said.
Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist who resigned from an Iowa news station after receiving threats for his frank, science-based coverage of climate disasters, said the retiring of the database suggests the Trump administration is “okay with spending billions of dollars on disasters.”
Billion dollar disasters are a way to track how our weather is turning more extreme because of #climatechange
— Chris Gloninger, CCM, CBM (@ChrisGloninger) May 8, 2025
“Every dollar that we spend on mitigation or adaptation saves $13 in recovery costs,” said Gloninger. “But their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it’s not a problem.”
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Residents collect garbage and debris to burn in the town of Acoua after Cyclone Chido wreaked havoc on the French island territory of Mayotte on December 25, 2024. (Photo: Patrick Meinhardt/AFP via Getty Images)
“This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become… and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
Just over two dozen climate-fueled extreme weather events killed at least 3,700 people worldwide and displaced millions in 2024, according to a report published Friday as the hottest year on record drew to a close.
The new analysis from World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central states that extreme weather “reached dangerous new heights in 2024” as “record-breaking temperatures fueled unrelenting heatwaves, drought, wildfire, storms, and floods that killed thousands of people and forced millions from their homes.”
“This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become with 1.3°C of human-induced warming, and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” said the two organizations, which examined 26 destructive weather events that occurred in 2024—a fraction of the hundreds that took place globally this year.
Those 26 events—from Hurricane Helene in the United States to the typhoon that hammered the Philippines, China, and Taiwan— caused close to 4,000 deaths, according to WWA and Climate Central.
“It’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands,” the analysis states.
“Extremes will continue to worsen with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming.”
Around the world, the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency added, on average, 41 additional days of dangerous heat this year, Climate Central found.
“The countries that experienced the highest number of dangerous heat days are overwhelmingly small island and developing states, who are highly vulnerable and considered to be on the frontlines of climate change,” the analysis says.
WWA and Climate Central said their findings should spur global action to shift away from fossil fuel, the burning of which is “the primary reason extreme weather is becoming more severe,” they said.
“Extremes will continue to worsen with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming,” WWA and Climate Central added. “A rapid move to renewable energy will help make the world a safer, healthier, wealthier, and more stable place.”
Nearly half of countries endured at least two months of high-risk temperatures, data shows. Photograph: Fernando Bustamante/AP
Analysis shows fossil fuels are supercharging heatwaves, leaving millions prone to deadly temperatures
The climate crisis caused an additional six weeks of dangerously hot days in 2024 for the average person, supercharging the fatal impact of heatwaves around the world.
The effects of human-caused global heating were far worse for some people, an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central has shown. Those in Caribbean and Pacific island states were the hardest hit. Many endured about 150 more days of dangerous heat than they would have done without global heating, almost half the year.
Nearly half the world’s countries endured at least two months of high-risk temperatures. Even in the least affected places, such as the UK, US and Australia, the carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning has led to an extra three weeks of elevated temperatures.
Worsened heatwaves are the deadliest consequence of the climate emergency. An end to coal, oil and gas burning was vital to stopping the effects getting even worse, the scientists said, with 2024 forecast to be the hottest year on record with record-high carbon emissions.
The researchers called for deaths from heatwaves to be reported in real time, with current data being a “very gross underestimate” because of the lack of monitoring. It is possible that uncounted millions of people have died as a result of human-caused global heating in recent decades.
AS heatwaves and wildfires sweep across swathes of southern Europe, north Africa and North America, today’s report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) rang timely alarm bells.
WWA scientists predict that highly inflammatory temperatures of up to 45°C (Palermo has just reached 47°C) should no longer be regarded as unusual.
They estimate that heatwaves of the kind we have seen this July can be expected to recur around once every 15 years in North America, every 10 years in Europe and every five years in China.
Moreover, they warn that if the planet’s temperatures rise by another 1°C, on top of the 1°C increase since the late 19th century, heatwaves and wildfires will strike even more frequently.
Underlying these projections is the certainty — supported by an Everest-sized pile of scientific evidence and shared by almost all climate scientists and their professional organisations — that human activity is by far the biggest cause of global warming.
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Yet the Westminster government and the Labour opposition have spent the past week — of all weeks — diluting the case and the policies for meeting Britain’s net-zero emissions target by 2050.
The Conservatives favour the exploitation of new oil, gas and coal sources while blocking onshore wind developments. With Labour’s support, they are pushing ahead with a major rearmament programme. As the Scientists for Global Responsibility point out in their invaluable report, The Environmental Impacts of the UK Military Sector (2020), the production, testing and use of armaments contribute hugely to greenhouse gas emissions — yet the figures are concealed from the public and excluded from official statistics by Britain and many other states.
The Labour leadership has announced the postponement of its Green Investment Plan even before winning a general election and taking office.
Instead of explaining the need for ultra-low emission zones (Ulez) based on genuine local consultation and support for people’s jobs and living standards, Keir Starmer blames London’s Labour mayor and Ulez for the party’s defeat in a parliamentary by-election.
A man walks on a hot summer day in Srinagar, India-controlled Kashmir, July 25, 2024
