The year was hotter than all other years on record
Climate Change in the Last Ten Years: Forecasting the Global Average Annual Temperature to at least 1.5 °C and Predictions for 2023
The precise estimates vary according to the datasets used, but all the analyses conclude that the global average annual temperature was near or above the 1.5 °C limit that countries pledged to try to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate accord, to help prevent the worst impacts of climate change. The world has gone over the threshold in almost half of the days in the past ten years, and two days in November exceeded 2 C.
The global average includes temperatures measured throughout the year over both land and oceans, and changes are usually an order of magnitude smaller.
It was a banner year for storms in China, Mexico and both northern and southern Africa, causing tens of billion of dollars in damage and killing dozens of people.
That’s because humans are releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, primarily by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas. Global emissions are still rising, despite some efforts to rein in planet-warming pollution. The United States emissions of greenhouse gasses dropped by 2% last year but the decline was still way short of the nation’s climate targets.
It is possible that El Nio conditions will persist well into the year of 2024, potentially setting up another record-breaking year.
The Met Office is predicting that there will be a good chance of a global average surface temperature going over the 1.5 C mark in four years. (The Met Office analysis has 2023 as 1.46 °C above the pre-industrial average.) “It is the first time we are forecasting” this, says Nick Dunstone, a climate scientist at the Met Office who led the work. The threshold to have formally violated the Paris agreement has to be surpassed at one or more decades, researchers say because passing 1.5 C for one year does not mean that the agreement has been violated.
But the extreme climate and weather impacts of 2023 underscore how humanity has fundamentally altered the planet. Ruth Cerezo Mota, a climate scientist at the National University of Mexico in Mérida, says that this is just a preview of what is to come if we do not act now.
A category five Hurricane slammed into the Mexican city of Acapulco, killing more than thirty people, due to climate change. Wildfires in Quebec, Canada, in June and July poured smoke across major cities, including many in the midwestern and northeastern United States. Blazes raged across Greece in July and August, incinerating forests and killing a number of people. In August, a fire on the island of Maui killed at least 100 people.
Heatwaves also baked many parts of the world, with China recording its highest temperature ever and Phoenix, Arizona, experiencing 31 consecutive days at 43 °C (110 °F) or above. In Mexico, more than 200 people died in a heatwave in July, and a three-year drought in East Africa, exacerbated by climate change, has led to food insecurity and refugee movements.
Why fossil fuels cannot be used for energy: Comment on a United Nations climate summit report on the progress made at COP28 in Dubai
By the end of the year, global leaders at COP28, the United Nations climate summit held in Dubai, had agreed for the first time to transition away from using fossil fuels for energy — a move that many say is too little, too late.
