by It’s official: 2023 was the hottest year on record.
On Friday (January 12), climate scientists from NASA and NOAA released data showing that temperatures continue to rise at alarming rates, contributing to extreme weather events affecting the world’s climate. The NOAA and NASA analyzes did not use satellite data or weather forecasts. Instead, their analysis used surface data that included sea surface temperatures measured by ships and buoys and air temperatures collected by ground weather stations to track climate change.
Those analyzes surprised scientists. “The results are amazing,” said Sarah Kapnick, chief scientist at NOAA. “2023 was an exceptionally warm year with many costly climate-driven weather events here in the United States and around the world.”
Gavin Schmidt, director, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that the different average temperatures in which 2023 beat the previous record years of 2016 and 2020 are much higher than the estimates of measurement uncertainty, which makes scientists confident 2023 to be declared the hottest year on record. . “None of those uncertainties are big enough to change the bottom line we’re talking about,” Schmidt added.
“And so, we are looking at this and we are frankly, surprised.”
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Schmidt added that the higher temperatures are in line with the agency’s predictions for the impact of changes in greenhouse gases and other forces on global temperature.
Russ Vose, chief of the analysis and synthesis branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, detailed the changes in measured levels of greenhouse gases, which can trap heat within the Earth’s atmosphere. “Carbon dioxide concentrations are about 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. Methane is up about 150%, nitrous oxide about 25%. Today’s carbon dioxide concentrations are at elevated levels, essentially higher than at least the last 2 million years. There was one recent study that said it may have been harder than the last 14 million. So it’s been a long time since they were that high,” Vose said.
Despite record temperatures around the world, some areas of the Earth experienced below-average temperatures in 2023, including East Asia and North America. However, scientists say this variation is “somewhat typical” and despite the variation, “2023 wins by a longshot” in terms of the highest average temperature, Vose said.
Vose went on to add that based on current models, 2023 may not be the record by far. in the top five. records, last year at this time, we were saying there was only a 7% chance that 2023 would be the hottest year on record. So the point is you have to take these things with a grain of salt salt.”
NOAA’s Kapnick also said extreme weather events in 2023 had a major impact on the American economy. “The United States had 28 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this past year, causing more than 90 billion in damages. The 28 events easily surpassed the previous record of 22 events set in 2020,” Kapnick said. The scientist added that since 1980, 376 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters have hit the United States that have collectively cost the nation over $2.6 trillion.
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Data collected by NOAA and NASA show that the Arctic is warming about 3.5 times faster than the global average and while Antarctic sea ice trends are also changing rapidly, these changes are not yet easily explained.
Similarly, there are trends and forces that may be affecting these temperature measurements around the world that are still not well understood, scientists said during the conference.
But without doubt, global temperatures reached their highest average levels in 2023.
A separate study published by the UK Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia reached the same conclusion, as did another study published by a multinational team of scientists using data from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at Academy Chinese Sciences (CAS).
NASA’s complete dataset of global surface temperatures through 2023, including a description of how NASA scientists performed the analysis, is publicly available online.
