If 2020 hadn’t been the year of COVID-19, it might have gone down as the year that the climate crisis became more obvious than it had ever been before. By the end of January, fires in Australia that began in late 2019 had burned through an area larger than Ireland. In April, the Great Barrier Reef reported the most widespread coral bleaching event on record. In July, as much as a third of Bangladesh flooded, displacing millions of people. In August, record-breaking fires in California temporarily turned the sky dark orange, and then made it unsafe to breathe outside for weeks. In November, after a record number of storms in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific flooded Vietnam and damaged hundreds of thousands of homes in the Philippines. In the U.S., there were a record number of billion-dollar disasters over the year.
Image: Joe Biden - Official portrait, 2013 - Wikipedia.com
