by The latest calculations from several scientific agencies that show global heat records that destroyed the Earth last year may seem alarming. But scientists worry that what’s behind those numbers could be even worse.
The Associated Press asked more than three dozen scientists in interviews and emails what the smashed records mean. Most said they fear an acceleration of climate change that is on the brink of an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times that nations had hoped to stay within.
“The heat of the past calendar year was a dramatic message from Mother Nature,” said Katharine Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist. Scientists say warming air and water are making deadly and costly heat waves, floods, droughts, storms and wildfires more intense and more likely.
Last year was a doozy.
Global average temperatures broke the previous record by a little more than a quarter (0.15 degrees Celsius), a large margin, according to calculations on Friday from America’s two top science agencies, Britain’s meteorological service and a private climate watchdog group. skeptical.
Many of the scientists who did the calculations said the climate would behave strangely in 2023. They wonder if human-caused climate change and natural El Nino have contributed to a freak blip or if “something more systematic is going on.” such as NASA climate. scientist Gavin Schmidt said it – including the much-debated acceleration of warming.
A partial answer may not come until late spring or early summer. That’s when a strong El Nino – the cyclical warming of Pacific Ocean waters that affects global weather patterns – is expected to subside. If sea temperatures, including deep waters, hold records well into the summer, as they did in 2023, that would be an ominous clue, they say.
Nearly every scientist who answered questions from the AP blamed greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels as the main cause of the world hitting temperatures probably never seen before by human civilization. El Nino, which is bordering on “very strong,” is the second biggest factor, with other conditions far behind, they said.
The trouble with 2023, said NASA’s Schmidt, is that “it was a very strange year … The more you dig into it, the less clear it seems.”
One part of that is the timing of the start of the big heat burst of 2023, according to Schmidt and Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Copernicus Climate Service, which put warming at 1.48 degrees Celsius earlier this week. above pre-industrial times.
Temperatures are typically higher than normal in late winter and spring, they said. But the highest heat in 2023 came around June and remained at record levels for months.
Deep ocean heat, a major player in global temperature, behaved the same way, Burgess said.
Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, often considered to be the father of global warming science, last year’s theory that warming was accelerating. While many of the scientists contacted by the AP said they doubt it’s happening, others were adamant that the evidence so far only supports a steady and long-predicted increase.
“There is some evidence that the rate of warming over the last decade or so has been slightly faster than the previous decade or so — which meets the mathematical definition of acceleration,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. “However, this is also largely consistent with predictions” that warming would accelerate at some point, particularly as particulate pollution in the air declines.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has calculated that the Earth will have an average temperature of 59.12 degrees (15.08 degrees Celsius) in 2023. That is 0.27 degrees (0.15 degrees Celsius) warmer than the previous record set in 2016 and 2.43 degrees (1.35 degrees Celsius ) warmer than pre-industrial temperatures.
“It’s almost as if we’ve talked ourselves off the stairs (of normal global warming temperature increases) into a slightly warmer regime,” said Russ Vose, chief of global monitoring for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. He said he sees the acceleration of warming.
NASA and the UK Met Office had warming slightly higher since the mid-19th century at 2.5 degrees (1.39 degrees Celsius) and 2.63 degrees (1.46 degrees Celsius) respectively. Records date back to 1850.
The World Meteorological Organization, which combines the measurements announced on Friday with Japanese and European calculations released earlier this month, put 2023 at 1.45 degrees Celsius (2.61 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial temperatures.
Many climate scientists had little hope that warming would be stopped at the 1.5 degree target called for in the 2015 Paris agreement which sought to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
“I don’t think it’s realistic that we can limit warming (averaged over several years) to 1.5C,” Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis wrote in an email. “It is technically possible but politically impossible.”
“The slow pace of climate action and the constant disinformation that drives it has not been about a lack of science or even a lack of solutions: it has always been, and still is, about a lack of political will,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The . Nature Conservancy.
NASA and NOAA said the last 10 years, from 2014 to 2023, are the warmest 10 years they have measured. This is the third time in the last eight years that a global heat record has been set. Randall Cerveny, an Arizona State University scientist who helps coordinate record keeping for the WMO, said the biggest concern is not that records were broken last year, but that they are happening so often.
“The most frightening thing for me is the rapidity of the continuous change,” Cerveny said.
Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said, “This is just a taste of what we can expect in the future, especially if we continue to fail to cut carbon dioxide fast enough. .”
That’s why so many scientists contacted by The Associated Press are concerned.
“I’ve been concerned since the early 1990s,” said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb. “I’m more worried than ever. My concern increases every year when global emissions move in the wrong direction.”
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Read more about AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears
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