Following news that 2024 was the hottest year on record, local experts took a moment to revisit potential impacts for the Cape, Coast, and Islands — as well as the wider region.
On Friday, federal officials with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Massachusetts endured its third hottest year on record, while the 2024 global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures in the 1800s.
That number became noteworthy in 2015, when countries around the world, including the U.S., pledged to avoid warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius in the historic Paris Climate Agreement.
“It’s not really 1.5 until it’s a decade of 1.5,” said Chris McGuire, the Ocean Program Director for The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts. “But, you know, I think that the point is: climate change is here and it’s happening quickly.”
Locally, this kind of intense warming is likely to fuel drought, wildfire, flooding, and more frequent and powerful storms.
“Warmer water means that more moisture is going to be evaporated into the air,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist with Woodwell Climate Research Center. “We are already seeing a 4-to-5 percent increase in water vapor in the atmosphere over the last few decades.”
“Locally, that water vapor is the energy that storms feed off of,” Francis said. “And so when a storm does come along, it has more fuel to tap into. And that is going to make those storms that much stronger and also supply more moisture for those storms. So we fully expect to see more of the kinds of flooding events that have been affecting Vermont and parts of Massachusetts last summer and even winter storms as well.”
These warmer ocean temperatures will also impact the marine environment.
“The warming waters result in species shift. That results in acidification. That results in sea level rise. It results in harmful algal blooms,” McGuire said.
Many important local species are migrating out of the area while more southern species migrate into local waters, he said.
“There’s really no cod around Cape Cod anymore. You know, a lot of the groundfish species — your cod and haddock and flounder — are pretty depleted right now,” McGuire said. Meanwhile, “we’re seeing a lot more squid in our waters than we have in the past. We see a lot more Black Sea bass…. People are catching mahi-mahi south of the Vineyard. That is a fish that I used to catch when we were sailing in the Caribbean.”
To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, Francis said, the world must cut down on burning fossil fuels and move instead toward renewable sources of energy, and protect the natural environment. At the same time, she urged, people must prepare for extreme storms and other events.
“We need to somehow ratchet up the volume of these alarm bells because they really are getting worse,” she said. “This is all going to get worse no matter what we do. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we possibly can, because every hundredth of a degree of warming that we can prevent is going to make these extreme events less that in the future.”
McGuire agreed.
“What we don’t do is just throw up our hands and say, you know, ‘We’re cooked,’” he said. “Just because we’ve passed a somewhat arbitrary milestone, we still are starting to turn the corner, and we need to keep going on reducing the things that are drivers of climate change.”
This story was originally published by CAI. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
