The planet will be hotter in 2023 than in any other year in recorded history, The Guardian reports.
The scientists made the announcement ahead of a landmark climate summit to be held this month. Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said:
“We can say with near certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, and is currently 1.43C above the pre-industrial average. The sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into Cop28 has never been higher.”
Copernicus scientists report that last month was the hottest October on record. The temperature was 1.7 C above what was considered average for October in the late 1800s.
People are pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. This has raised the planet’s temperature by 1.2 C since the Industrial Revolution. According to scientists, the global temperature anomaly in October 2023 was the second highest of any month in the dataset, second only to the previous month. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, said:
“The fact that we’re seeing this record hot year means record human suffering. Within this year, extreme heatwaves and droughts made much worse by these extreme temperatures have caused thousands of deaths, people losing their livelihoods, being displaced etc. These are the records that matter. That is why the Paris agreement is a human rights treaty, and not keeping to the goals in it, is violating human rights on a vast scale.”
Eight years ago, at the Paris summit, world leaders pledged to try to stop the planet warming by 1.5 C by the end of the century. But the current policy will result in the planet heating up by about 2.4 C. Akshay Deoras, a meteorology researcher at the University of Reading, said:
“The sizzling October 2023 is another unfortunate example that shows how temperature records are getting shattered by a humongous margin. Global warming due to increased greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean are hitting the planet really hard.”
October’s record-breaking heat wave has stunned scientists. They believe the extreme temperatures were caused by a powerful combination of greenhouse gas pollution, the return of a natural El Niño weather pattern and a number of other factors, including reduced sulphur pollution and a volcanic eruption in Tonga.
Copernicus said El Niño conditions continue to develop, but temperature anomalies are still lower than during previous strong events in 1997 and 2015. Deoras said:
“It is frightening to see that the global temperature since June 2023 is much warmer than that during the second half of 2015, when El Niño was much stronger. Our planet continues to pass through unfortunate milestones in its meteorological history, and it won’t be surprising to see new records in subsequent months.”
The World Meteorological Organisation said on Wednesday that the current El Niño will last until at least April 2024. Since the effects of El Niño usually show up the very next year after it forms, experts believe 2024 is likely to be even hotter.
According to Copernicus, the average global temperature between January and October 2023 was the highest ever recorded. It was 0.1 °C higher than the 10-month average temperature of 2016 – the current record holder for the hottest year on record. Richard Allan, a climatologist at the University of Reading, said:
“Only with rapid and massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, across all sectors, can we avoid these repeating headlines of record-breaking warmth and, more importantly, limit the growing severity of wet, hot and dry extremes that accompany a rapidly warming world.”
