By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

2024 A Record-Breaking Year

The year 2024 was a record-breaking one, and not in a good way. In July, Earth's average temperature was the highest it has been in at least 175 years, with July 22 specifically being the hottest day on record. This past summer was the hottest summer since about the year 1880, this year's hurricane season started with Beryl — the earliest Category 4 hurricane on record — and a report published in June confirmed that human-driven global warming is at an all-time high.

But it isn't just the headline-making record-breakers that scientists are worried about. As of this year, glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates due to all this human-induced heat, sea levels are irreversibly rising as a result of those glaciers melting, coastal communities are being ravaged by storms exacerbated through such sea level rise combined with high temperatures, and animals are getting evicted from their homes because Earth is changing too much, too quickly. Just last month, we saw Hurricane Helene destroy towns and claim lives — and its strength has indeed been connected to climate change.

It's certainly heavy to see the facts laid out like this, especially considering how much those paragraphs leave unsaid. This feeling, however, brings to the forefront something very important: it is, on a baseline level, valuable that this information exists at all. Perhaps the biggest limiting step in the fight against climate change is turning facts into actionable tasks and, in turn, convincing policymakers to start making major changes in the way our world is run. The climate crisis is a deceptively political problem, meaning the future of Earth hinges on data — and, depending on how you see it, that data hinges on an unlikely source: space exploration.

 

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