THE year began with extreme weather in Australia. Bushfires in the nation, made possible by a severe drought, produced apocalyptic scenes of ships rescuing people from beaches, dry thunderstorm clouds and wildlife fleeing beneath orange skies.
The fires pumped three times the amount of smoke into the stratosphere as anything seen before, and they burned an unprecedented 58,000 square kilometres of forest in New South Wales and Victoria. While partly due to natural cycles, the weather conditions that enabled the fires were found to be made more likely by human-made climate change.
It wouldn’t be the last extreme weather event of 2020 linked to climate change. Though it didn’t affect heavily populated areas and so grabbed less attention, Siberia’s months-long heatwave was one of the most striking incidents. Temperatures were 10°C above average in some parts of the region in May, and one town in the Arctic circle hit 38°C. An analysis found the event would have been “effectively impossible” without the warming that humans have caused.
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That heat also contributed to the very low levels of Arctic sea ice on the Russian side of the region, resulting in total Arctic sea ice for the year falling to its second lowest extent on record. This year, October – when the region begins to freeze – saw the lowest extent ever recorded for the month. Heat in the region also fostered a second year of record CO2 emissions from Arctic fires.
In August, wildfires along the US west coast saw hundreds of thousands of people evacuated. California was hit by five of the six largest fires in the state’s history, which were triggered early in the region’s fire season by lightning strikes. More than 16,000 square kilometres of land were burned across California, twice the previous record. Higher temperatures as a result of climate change are drying out the vegetation, making it easier to burn.
This year, the US was hit by 16 disasters that each caused more than a billion dollars of damage, tying it with 2011 and 2017, according to Adam Smith at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season exceeded the record 28 storms seen in 2005, as Theta and Iota became its 29th and 30th storms in November.
On the other side of the world, Typhoon Goni (known locally as Rolly) in the Philippines reached wind speeds of , the year’s strongest storm globally. And in Europe, a rare “medicane” – a Mediterranean hurricane – hit Greece.
Overall, global temperatures are well above the long-term average. “2020 is highly likely to be in the top three warmest years and may be the warmest year for Europe,” says Samantha Burgess at the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
