Singapore Had 122 More Dangerous Heat Days This Year Due To Climate Change

The Republic would have experienced only four such days otherwise: Report

- Chin Hui Shan

The impacts of climate change on Singapore's weather are already being felt, with scientists estimating that the Republic experienced 122 extra days of dangerous heat in 2024.

Without climate change, the country would experience only four such days, said a new climate report published on Dec 27.

The report defined dangerous heat days as days when mean temperatures were hotter than the warmest 10 per cent of temperatures observed over the 1991 to 2020 period.

The report was done by scientific research organisation World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central, a non-profit group of scientists and communicators.

Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, can happen naturally, but are made worse by climate change.

Climate change today is driven by ever-increasing amounts of planet-warming gases being released into the atmosphere from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels.

The field of study in which the fingerprints of climate change are detected in extreme weather events is known as attribution studies.

For the study, the researchers relied on temperature data from 220 countries and territories from the ERA5 dataset, which is produced by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the bloc's earth observation programme.

The researchers compared the temperatures in each location in 2024 with the temperature trends observed in the preceding decades, between 1991 and 2020.

The Singapore data was extrapolated from the data for the broader South-east Asian region. The mean daily average temperature across South-east Asia in 2024 was 27.4 deg C. This is 0.8 deg C hotter than the average year from 1991 to 2020.

"Singapore has a very distinct climate, which highlights the impact of global warming more than most countries do," Climate Central research associate Joseph Giguere told The Sunday Times.