CLIMATE: EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

2024 is going to be the hottest year ever recorded. As global warming smashes safety barriers, what did we learn?

- Bibek Bhattacharya

How do we feel the effects of climate change in our everyday lives? It could be in the form of the intense heat wave that swept through Delhi in the summer. On 29 May, the daytime temperature read 52.3 degrees Celsius on one of the city's temperature stations, before the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) announced that the sensor had malfunctioned.

Or it may be the way that scientist Minal Pathak watched on in horror as eastern Spain was swamped by a deadly flood in late October. It may also be the way that economist Ulka Kelkar was shocked to see her garden dying one day at a time, as Bengaluru endured months of drought at the beginning of the year.

"I used to joke that I live in the safest city because it is cool, it doesn't get hot. There are no rivers, so nothing will flood. There are no earthquakes unlike in north India or Delhi. And there are no cyclones because it's inland," says Kelkar, who is the executive programme director of Climate, Economics and Finance at World Resources Institute (WRI) India. "Then rains just didn't come for months at a time, and I remember being actually scared."

The ways climate change impacts the lives of people can be very different, but in 2024—a fateful year in the climate crisis—these impacts were everywhere, from polling agents dying of heatstroke during the Lok Sabha elections to hundreds of people killed in landslides in Kerala's Wayanad during the monsoon. And that's just in India.

If there was a theme for 2024, it was that climate disasters became a commonplace, like the dawn of a new era of instability. For Pathak, a faculty member at Ahmedabad University's Global Centre for Environment and Energy, it would seem that we have normalized this instability.