Japan says 2024 Hottest on Record

Worldwide, 2024 was expected to have been the warmest recorded, the U.N.'s weather and climate agency said last week, capping a decade of unprecedented heat and other types of extreme weather.

Across Japan, the average temperatures from January through December were 1.48 degrees Celsius higher than the 1991-2020 average, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said.

This was the most since the agency started releasing data in 1898 and higher than the previous year's record, which exceeded the average by 1.29 degrees Celsius.

Long term, "Japan's temperature has been rising in a pace of 1.40 Celsius per century, and high temperatures have been observed in particular since the 1990s," the JMA said.

Kaoru Takahashi, the JMA official in charge of weather information, told AFP that climate change was a "factor."

Japan's summer last year was already the joint hottest on record, equaling the level seen in 2023, while autumn was the warmest since records began.

Scientists say climate change is intensifying the risk of heavy rain in Japan and elsewhere, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

In September last year, floods and landslides killed 16 people in the remote Noto Peninsula in central Japan, already hit by a major earthquake on Jan. 1.

Other countries, including India, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, Germany and Brazil, also saw temperature records in 2024.

Source: HDN