Global warming: It's so yesterday's news. A climate-change denier has moved into the White House and petrostates have hijacked the United Nations' most important global warming conferences.
Still, our planet grows hotter by the day from human-produced pollution. No region demonstrates this better than Asia, where extreme heat, powerful storms, and prolonged drought kills people, livestock, and crops.
Heatwaves hammer India, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia. Last year's early monsoon flooded major rivers and key provinces of China, and now the Yellow River Basin, a major wheat-producing region, is hot and dry. In the world’s highest mountains, glaciers melt at alarming rates.
A new report out Monday from the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization finds that Asia is heating up nearly twice as fast as the global average, "fueling more extreme weather and wreaking a heavy toll on the region’s economies, ecosystems and societies."
WMO’s "State of the Climate in Asia" says that, depending on the dataset, last year went into the books as the warmest, or second warmest, year on record. The warming trend of 1991–2024 almost doubled that of 1961–1990.
High temperature records fall
The study "highlights the changes in key climate indicators such as surface temperature, glacier mass and sea level, which will have major repercussions for societies, economies and ecosystems in the region," says WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
Asia’s average temperature last year was 1.04° Celsius above the 1991–2020 average, with many areas of the continent seeing extreme heat. East Asia baked under prolonged heatwaves from April to November, with monthly temperature records falling one after another across China, Japan, and South Korea.
Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East also experienced extreme heat. Myanmar set a new national temperature record of 48.2° C.
Extreme rainfall wreaked havoc and caused heavy casualties in many Asian countries. Tropical cyclones left a trail of destruction, and drought caused major economic and agricultural losses.
Less winter snow and higher summer temperatures were punishing for glaciers. In the central Himalaya and Tian Shan range of Central Asia, WMO says, 23 of 24 glaciers suffered mass loss, leading to an increase in hazards like glacial lake outburst floods, landslides, and long-term risks for water security.
"Extreme weather is already exacting an unacceptably high toll," says Saulo.
A back-burner issue
The record-breaking hot weather is also heating up the region's seas.
Over the past few decades, the entire oceanic area of a broad swath of Asia reaching from the Arabian Peninsula to the western Pacific has seen significant surface ocean warming, with especially rapid increases in the northern Arabian Sea and western Pacific.
Sea surface temperatures have risen at an average rate of 0.24° per decade, nearly double the global average of 0.13°.
Last year, Asia's surrounding seas recorded their largest extent of marine heatwaves since record-keeping began in 1993, with strong to extreme events affecting much of the northern Indian Ocean, the waters near Japan, and the Yellow and East China seas.
By late summer, nearly 15 million square kilometers – about 10% of the global ocean surface and an area larger than Russia – were impacted. In the Indian and Pacific oceans bordering Asia, sea levels are rising faster than the global average, compounding threats to coastal communities and ecosystems.
Against this background, the urgency of climate change is slipping to the back burner as public attention shifts to the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and now the Israel-Iran conflict. Migration, inflation, economic fears, authoritarian politics, and backlash from right-wing populist movements all play a role and open the door for big-money fossil-fuel interests to assert influence under the guise of energy and national security.
Backpedaling on international climate policy has been on shameless display at recent U.N. climate summits, or Conferences of the Parties known as COPs, with major petroleum-producing nations hosting the proceedings and the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists playing outsized roles in shaping the agendas, outcomes and watered-down agreements.
The world, warns U.N. chief António Guterres, "is sleepwalking to climate catastrophe."
