To the surprise of absolutely no one who has a) lived on Earth for the past two decades or 2) isn’t in the far-right tank, 2024 was officially the hottest year since records began.

Due to fluctuations in temperature from year to year, climatologists compare the annual globally averaged temperature to the average over a range of several years from the past, typically 1951 – 1980 (using a multi-decade date range helps smooth out the distribution, giving the average more statistical weight). By subtracting the latter from the former we get what’s called the temperature anomaly, the deviation from average (see the graph below).

2024 was 1.28°C warmer than that baseline. However, even that mid-century span used for the average was already suffering from some warming; if instead you use the average from 1850 – 1900 2024 was 1.47°C warmer.

Either way: too damn hot.

Part of that was due to El Niño, a periodic weather pattern that warms the upper layers of the Pacific and drives temperatures up a bit. That started in 2023, but even so 2024 was warmer than expected, and stayed warm even after El Niño subsided.

Single year records don’t necessarily tell you much; you need to look for trends over time. That graph above is the temperature anomaly measured since 1880. It’s a handy way to look for any temporal trends in the temperature; a negative deviation means the planet has cooled compared to average, and a positive one means it’s warmed.

You may note there hasn’t been a negative deviation since the late 1970’s. If you’re younger than about 45 years old you’ve never lived on Earth during a cooler than average year.

I said above that single years don’t generally tell you much, so look at the trend over the last decade: the ten hottest years of all time have been the past ten years. Overall, it’s obvious that Earth is getting hotter over time, and has been for over a century now.

And while there are small fluctuations due to pollution, volcanoes, and the like, the main cause is us. Humans. In fact, we cause around 100% of global warming, and some scientists have estimated we actually cause more than 100%: if we weren’t actively heating things up the Earth should have cooled somewhat by now.

Instead, we’re still dumping 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide in to the air every year, dwarfing by far any other natural source. The extra heat means more water vapor in the air — which itself is a greenhouse gas — which means more torrential rains and flooding in some places, but it also shifts weather patterns dramatically which means other places get droughts.

As we have seen over the past few weeks (and in many winters in the past decade) the changing weather patterns over time means the jet stream also destabilizes, and all that frigid arctic air usually bottled up at high latitudes can come barreling down to mid-latitudes. Add to that the extra moisture in the air and you get snow and ice storms.

The world is telling us, screaming at us, that global warming is causing climate change, and we’re the reason why.

Despite all this, despite wildfires and once-a-century hurricanes happening every few years and droughts and floods, there are still those who deny it all. To our everlasting shame many of them are in power; as I write this Trump has nominated Chris Wright, an oil executive, to be Secretary of Energy. His single redeeming quality is that he acknowledges climate change is real, but don’t get too cozy with that; he denies climate change is a problem, saying reducing cold weather saves lives (which is trivially silly; even if true the increasing heat threatens hundreds of millions more people, not to mention all the weather disasters outlined above).

As so many have said so many times, elections have consequences. Climate change is still the number one mid- and long-term threat our species has ever faced. Yet it’s hardly mentioned by media as being a root cause of the wildfires in California (the winds were and still are exceptionally strong and extremely late in the season, both due to changing weather patterns), and the new Administration about to run this country actively works fighting any way to mitigate it. 

The good news is that their power is limited. States and local municipalities are switching to greener energy sources, for example, with solar and wind making up 90% of all new energy production in 2024. From that same link, China is producing more energy in solar alone than the US does in total. That’s phenomenal.

We still have a long way to go, but don’t forget — especially when everything seems doom and gloom — that progress is being made, and we can keep it going. I strongly urge everyone to subscribe to climatologist Katharine Hayhoe’s newsletter which gives an excellent overview of news, including the good and the bad, and critically a section on what you yourself can do to help. Any one person probably can’t change the world, but it turns out there are a lot of persons out there. Together, we are mighty.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!