2023 was officially the hottest year on record
Share- Nishadil
- January 09, 2024
- 0 Comments
- 1 minutes read
- 7 Views
Wildfires broke out on Maui, Hawaii, in August 2023 after a spell of dry weather Matthew Thayer/The Maui News via AP/Alamy It’s official: 2023 was the hottest year on record. The global average temperature for the year was 1.48°C warmer than the 1850 1900 pre industrial average, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
That is the highest since records began in 1940 and probably the highest in 100,000 years, Read more The year’s average temperature of 14.98°C (58.96°F) came close to , a limit that countries are aiming to avoid under the 2015 – although the goal applies to the long term average temperature rather than the average for a single year.
Advertisement “The extremes we have observed over the last few months provide a dramatic testimony of how far we now are from the climate in which our civilisation developed,” said , the director of (C3S), in a statement. “We need to urgently decarbonise.” In a first, every day of the year was at least 1°C warmer than pre industrial times.
at the UK Met Office says 2023 was even more scorching than forecasters expected. That is partly because El Niño, a natural climate phase that boosts temperatures, started earlier in the year than usual, although most of the warming is still due to human emissions. “The Met Office makes predictions on the forecast for the coming year every year,” says Betts.
“2023 was the first time it was substantially above what we would predict.” Sign up to our Fix the Planet newsletter Get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox every month. The sweltering temperatures made extreme weather like the heavy rains of Storm Daniel, which in Libya last September, .
The July heatwave in North America and Europe would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, World Weather Attribution scientists . Ocean temperatures were also unprecedented in 2023, the C3S said, and , which . This year will also be hot and could even break 2023’s record, says Betts.
Topics:.
