The news is not good. Here on Planet Earth, we live in perilous times. Such is the warning from fourteen climate experts from Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States in their article “The 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous times on planet Earth” published in the BioScience magazine on October 8, 2024.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” they warn. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

Why the bleak prognosis? Of the 35 “planetary vital signs” they use to track the climate emergency, 25 are at record extremes. These include U.S. heat-related mortality, fossil fuel subsidies, coal and oil consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, per-capita meat production, global tree cover loss due to fires, ocean acidity and heat content change, glacier thickness change, and ice mass change in Antarctica and Greenland.

As demonstrated in “Table 1: Recent Climate Disasters from November 2023 to August 2024,” they emphasize the rapidly escalating climate-related impacts of our global failure to support a rapid and socially just fossil fuel phasedown. Not included in this list are the supercharged Hurricanes Helene and Milton that developed in the Gulf of Mexico in late September during publication of their report. Unforeseen, too, are the flash floods in Spain on October 29th triggered by an “extraordinary deluge” that dumped twenty months of rain in just eight hours. Sounds familiar?