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Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold, and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.
The European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48°C (2.66°F) above pre-industrial times, The Associated Press reports. That’s barely below the 1.5° limit the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming.
And January, 2024 is on track to be so warm that for the first time a 12-month period will exceed the 1.5° threshold, Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said. Importantly, scientists have repeatedly said the Earth would need to average 1.5° of warming over two or three decades to be a technical breach of the threshold.
Miserable, Sometimes Deadly
The 1.5° goal “has to be (kept) alive because lives are at risk and choices have to be made,” Burgess said. “And these choices don’t impact you and I but they impact our children and our grandchildren.”
Notwithstanding Burgess’ optimism for today’s generations, AP notes the record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. Scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya, and the wildfires across Canada that had us tasting climate change in the back of our throats fouled the air from North America to Europe.
“We definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year,” said Imperial College London climate scientist Dr. Friederike Otto, head of World Weather Attribution, in a separate media event Tuesday.
The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least one million people or kill more than 100. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. “Basically, every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change,” she said.
‘From Slush to Sweat’
The shift in global conditions produced unprecedented warming in Canada, making 2023 the first year “where every square centimetre was warmer than normal,” Dave Phillips, senior climatologist at the Meteorological Service of Canada, told The Energy Mix last week. The year as a whole was likely Canada’s third-warmest on record, with colder conditions from February to April bringing down the 12-month average. And while temperatures for June through August were “clearly the warmest”, the numbers showed the variability you would expect in the country with the world’s second-largest land mass and multiple climates spanning 5½ time zones.
But the unique conditions came into focus after the Meteorological Service team added May and September to the calculation. Phillips, who said he’s been following weather data for 50 years, recalled May 1 as the date when temperatures soared and many parts of the country “went from slush to sweat”. Those five months were the first time all of Canada faced across-the-board average warming, a finding that was “quite spectacular and dramatic,” he said. “It just hasn’t happened before.”
The United States lurched through 28 weather disasters last year that caused at least US$1 billion in damage, smashing the old record of 22 set in 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday. The number of these costly disasters, with dollar figures adjusted to account for inflation, has soared, averaging only three per year in the 1980s and just under six per year in the 1990s, AP writes.
The billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. last year included a drought, four floods, 19 severe storms, two hurricanes, a wildfire, and a winter storm. NOAA said they combined to kill 492 people and cause nearly $93 billion in damage.
Antarctic sea ice hit record low levels in 2023 and broke eight monthly records for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.
Seven Record-Breaking Months
Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3°F) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98°C (58.96°F), Copernicus calculated.
“It was record-breaking for seven months. We had the warmest June, July, August, September, October, November, December,” Burgess said. “It wasn’t just a season or a month that was exceptional. It was exceptional for over half the year.”
There are several factors that made 2023 the warmest year on record, but by far the biggest factor was the ever-increasing amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, Burgess said. Those gases come primarily from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas.
Other factors included the natural El Niño—a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide—other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity, and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapour into the atmosphere, Burgess said.
Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3°C of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1°C from El Niño and the rest from smaller causes.
Copernicus records only go back to 1940 and are based on a combination of observations and forecast models. Other groups, including the NOAA, NASA, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, and Berkeley Earth go back to the mid-1800s and will announce their calculations for 2023 on Friday, with expectations of record-breaking marks.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency, which uses similar techniques as Copernicus and goes back to 1948, late last month estimated that 2023 was the warmest year at 1.47°C (2.64°F) above pre-industrial levels. The University of Alabama Huntsville global dataset, which uses satellite measurements rather than ground data and dates to 1979, last week also declared 2023 a record year for heating, but not by as much.
A 100,000-Year Record
Though actual observations only date back less than two centuries, several scientists say evidence from tree rings and ice cores suggest this is the warmest the Earth has been in more than 100,000 years.
“It basically means that our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms, in practice all human activities never had to cope with the climate this warm,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo told media Tuesday. “There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture, or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high.”
For the first time, as well, Copernicus recorded a day where the world averaged at least 2°C (3.6°F more than pre-industrial times. It happened twice and narrowly missed a third day around Christmas, Burgess said.
And for the first time, every day of the year was at least 1°C (1.8°F) warmer than pre-industrial times. For nearly half the year—173 days—the world was 1.5° warmer than the mid-1800s.
Meinshausen, the Australian climate scientist, said it’s natural for the public to wonder whether the 1.5° target is lost. He said it’s important to keep trying to rein in warming.
“We are not abolishing a speed limit, because somebody exceeded the speed limit,” he said. “We double our efforts to step on the brakes.”
But for now, Buontempo said it’s only going to get hotter: “Following the current trajectory in a few years’ time, the record-breaking year of 2023 will probably be remembered as a cold year.”
This Associated Press story was republished by The Canadian Press on January 9, 2023.
