Climate Point: 2021 among the warmest, most disastrous years on record

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Erin Erin Rode, writing from Palm Springs, California. 

It’s the beginning of the new year, which means a flurry of round-ups and data about 2021 — and the climate news isn’t great. Last year was the planet’s fifth-warmest year on record, and the past seven years were the warmest on record “by a clear margin,” according to new research released this week by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, as Doyle Rice reported for USA Today. The two warmest years were 2020 and 2016. 

Meanwhile, worldwide concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane continued to increase in 2021. As the U.S. economy recovered from the pandemic, emissions rose 6% last year after a record 10 decline in 2020, the New York Times reported. 

2021 was also a deadly year for weather, as 20 disasters killed more than 600 Americans, the most disaster-related fatalities for the contiguous U.S. since 2011. The deaths mostly resulted from the extreme summer heat in the Pacific Northwest, extreme cold across the South in February, Hurricane Ida, and the December tornado outbreak in the south, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The U.S. disaster cost for 2021 exceeded $145 billion, the third-highest cost on record, Rice also reported for USA Today. 

And the year ended with a “final exclamation point,” as Dinah Voyles Pulver wrote for USA Today, with a December of violent storms and record snowfall ending the year of wild weather and illustrating how the warming climate is influencing long-term weather trends. It was "a relentless end to a relentless year for weather disasters in the United States," meteorologist Steven Bowen, managing director of Catastrophe Insight at Aon, told Voyles Pulver.

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Sewage infrastructure. The $1 trillion infrastructure act includes $11.7 billion to upgrade municipal sewer and drainage systems, septic tanks and clustered systems for small communities. One region that stands to benefit is Alabama's Black Belt, named for the loamy soil that once made the region fertile ground for cotton production that relied on slave labor, Glenn Thrush reports for the New York Times.

Today, the region includes 17 counties where Black people make up three-quarters of the population, and where thousands of people use "straight pipes" for their sewage — a rudimentary system that directly spits out raw wastewater from behind homes. 

Green Raiteros. As the Biden administration looks to address inequities in the transition to green transportation, it may want to look at the small town of Huron in California's Central Valley, Evan Halper reports for the Los Angeles Times. When Huron Mayor Rey León was growing up, the city lacked solid public transportation options, and as mayor, his lobbying for reliable bus routes to nearby cities was stymied by costs. The farmworker community has since started the Green Raiteros, a fleet of electric cars that shuttle residents around Fresno County for free.