2024 shook the world in more ways than one.
It was the rumble of discontent as half the world went to the polls. It was the shudder that went through financial markets following the largest-ever IT outage. It was the Earth shaking, literally, as thousands danced at the biggest concert tour in history. It was the shock waves that bloodshed in Ukraine, Gaza and more than 50 other conflict zones sent across the globe.
From politics to pop culture, climate to conflict, the charts below reveal seven ways 2024 sent records tumbling.
Global conflict reached new heights
2024 ranks among the most violent years in recent history, according to at least two datasets tracking armed conflict around the world.
Political violence hit a high in 2024
Countries and territories ranked each year from most to fewest violent events
Political violence rose for the third year in a row in 2024 to nearly 180,000 events, spurred mainly by conflicts in Ukraine, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Myanmar, according to the US-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Index.
A “political violence event” is defined as a single altercation where force is used by one or more groups toward a political end.
The upward trend in conflict is backed by separate figures from the Sweden-based Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which rank 2024 as the equal-second most violent year (alongside 2020 and 2022) in nearly three decades of records. The dataset counts state-based armed conflicts with at least 25 deaths in any calendar year.
With a month to go, 2024 was already the second-most violent year since WWII
According to unpublished data shared with the ABC, UDCP has tallied 56 such conflicts from January to November 2024.
This is three fewer than 2023, the worst year since 1946. However, the 2024 figure is based on provisional data, so could rise.
“The final figure will be at least 56 but could be higher when [data for] December is added and everything is finalised,” UCDP project manager Therese Pettersson told the ABC.
Sarah Phillips, Professor of Global Conflict and Development at the University of Sydney, said we’re seeing more conflicts around the world because weakened states have allowed or even encouraged violent groups like militia and terrorists to flourish.
“We talk about states as the primary unit of power in the world, but the reality is that they have been hollowed out for decades,” she says.
“As state power becomes more tenuous, many leaders hold on … by turning a blind eye to, or even facilitating, the violent groups that would seem to be their natural rivals.”
It’s a kind of divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at fragmenting the state’s opponents. But it often comes with unintended consequences, Professor Phillips explained.
“This is a common tactic but the more it’s used, the more it cannibalises the legitimacy of the state and feeds opposition to it, amplifying the cycle of violence.”
Half the world went to the polls
More than 60 countries plus the 27 member states of the European Union held elections in 2024. Combined, these countries are home to some 4.2 billion people or half the world’s population.
2024 was the biggest-ever election year
From Senegal to South Korea, power in 2024 shifted at a sometimes dizzying pace. In the UK, the Conservative Party lost its 14-year grip on power while across the channel in Europe, far-right parties took centre stage. South Africa’s African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since taking power in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Mexico elected its first female president in a landslide.
Mass government protests in Bangladesh forced the prime minister to flee following a poll boycotted by the main opposition party. In Iran, conservatives won most of the seats in a contest with the lowest voter turnout since the 1979 revolution. Meanwhile, the US is poised for a convicted felon to assume the presidency for the first time.
Perhaps what emerges most clearly from the tumult is a desire for change, in whatever form. The ParlGov global research project found every single governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share — a first in nearly 120 years of records, the Financial Times reported.
This is the disinhibiting power of hopelessness, according to Michael Bruter, director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
When things feel so bad that they can’t get worse, some people will vote for parties they don’t believe have the solutions, he told Time magazine.
“The situation is so desperate that they want change at any cost.”
Taylor Swift eclipsed all concert tours in history
It shattered numerous attendance records, produced the highest-grossing concert film ever and triggered seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake with its dancing, according to one seismologist.
By virtually any measure, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which wrapped up in Vancouver, Canada on December 8, was an astronomical success. So below we’ve illustrated just one data point: Eras sold an unprecedented $US2.078 billion ($3.33 billion) in tickets, according to Swift’s production company.
This is more than double the previous record and eclipses every other concert tour in history, even after adjusting for inflation and the number of shows.
The 20 highest-grossing concert tours in history
Gross ticket sales (2023 US dollars). Bigger circle = More shows
Liz Giuffre, a senior lecturer in communication and music, and sound design at UTS, said many of Swift’s biggest fans are groups that have always been big concert-goers but are often overlooked.
“She has such strong appeal for young women, girls and LGBTQI+ audiences… Think about how powerful the early Beatles were,” she says, pointing out that, in demographic terms, Swift and the Beatles share the same group of fans.
“There’s a real force in this demographic; one that seldom gets as strongly served, especially by a female artist.”
Ozempic’s maker became a $US500 billion behemoth
Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, manufacturer of weight-loss wonder drug Ozempic, hit a market capitalisation of half-a-trillion US dollars ($800.77 billion) in 2024.
Novo Nordisk is bigger than Denmark’s entire economy
Despite the company’s history stretching back 100 years, Novo Nordisk only recently exploded into the public eye when social media videos spruiking Ozempic for rapid weight loss went viral and celebrities like Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian publicly lauded the drug for its weight-loss effects.
The worldwide stampede and resulting global shortage of the injectable medicine has created serious problems for people who need the drug for its original purpose: to treat diabetes.
Now, Novo Nordisk’s spectacular growth has sparked new concerns in its home country. With a market value larger than Denmark’s annual GDP, Novo Nordisk was the key force behind the expansion of Denmark’s economy last year, fuelling fears that if Novo Nordisk stumbles or falls, it could drag down the country’s entire economy.
We’re headed for the hottest year on record
2024 is set to be the warmest year since records began in the 1850s and the first year to average 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to data to November.
2024 will be the first year to exceed the 1.5ºC threshold
Average temperatures for 16 of the past 17 months reached past the 1.5 degree threshold set by the Paris Agreement. November 2024 was 1.62 degrees above the pre-industrial level (1840-1900).
The global average temperature in 2024 is virtually certain to be more than 1.55ºC, compared to 1.48ºC in 2023, according to ERA5 data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
2023 previously held the title for hottest year on record.
“For 2024 to not be warmer than 2023, the average temperature anomaly for the remaining two months of this year would have to decrease by an unprecedented amount, nearly reaching zero,” the C3S October climate bulletin reads.
Artificial intelligence sent emissions soaring
Our seemingly insatiable appetite for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency has added a whole new dimension to the problem of reducing emissions.
According to one estimate, the computational power needed to sustain the rise of AI alone is doubling roughly every 100 days. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts data centre electricity use could double by 2026, fuelled by the rise of AI and cryptocurrency mining.
This mammoth demand for energy comes with enormous environmental impacts. Tech titans Meta, Microsoft and Google all admitted that energy demands linked to their AI products have sent emissions soaring — Meta’s rose by 65 per cent in two years, Google’s by 48 per cent in five years and Microsoft by 40 per cent in four years.
Paul Haskell-Dowland, professor of computing and security at Edith Cowan University, said investing in green technologies alongside AI might buy us enough time to reach the point where AI itself could recommend ways to solve the problem.
Another shorter-term possibility with more dramatic consequences, is companies charging for AI products as a way to reduce demand. Such a move, he warned, “would also introduce significant disadvantage to those unable or unwilling to afford the ‘premium’ services”.
A Chat-GPT text query uses nearly 10 times the power of a traditional Google search; an AI-powered Google search uses roughly 26 times the energy as the old-fashioned search.
But these are a drop in the ocean compared to a single bitcoin transaction. This sucks up roughly 3.3 million times as much energy as a traditional Google search.
AI and cryptocurrency have turbocharged energy consumption
An ’embarrassing’ blunder caused the worst-ever tech outage
The faulty software update by US cybersecurity company Crowdstrike threw airports into chaos, sent banks and other businesses into meltdown and drained an estimated $US5.4 billion ($8.65 billion) from Fortune 500 companies.
Crowdstrike apologised “unreservedly” for the failure after its CEO George Kurtz was called to testify before the US Congress and explain what happened.
But the most embarrassing part, according to one expert, was that the dodgy update that trapped millions of users in a blue screen of death (BSOD) loop is the kind of mistake that first-year programming students are taught to avoid.
