by Last year the Earth broke annual global heat records, approached the global warming threshold and showed more signs of planet fever, the European climate agency said on Tuesday.
European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That’s barely below the 1.5 degree Celsius limit the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the effects of the most extreme warming.
And January 2024 is on track to be so warm that a 12-month period will exceed the 1.5 degree threshold for the first time, Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said. Scientists have repeatedly said that the Earth would need to average 1.5 degrees of warming over two to three decades to be a technical breach of the threshold.
The 1.5 degree target “must be (kept) alive because lives are at stake and choices have to be made,” Burgess said. “And these choices don’t affect you or me, they affect our children and our grandchildren.”
Record-breaking heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and elsewhere last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, such as the prolonged drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the storm surge that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canadian wildfires that have ravaged the air from North America. to Europe.
In a separate press event on Tuesday, international climate scientists who calculate the role of global warming in extreme weather, said the leader of the group, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto, “we certainly see in our analysis the strong influence of at the hottest year.”
The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least 1 million people or kill more than 100 people. 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 deadly heat waves. “Essentially every heat wave that occurs today is more likely and warmer because of human-caused climate change,” she said.
The United States battled 28 weather disasters last year that caused at least $1 billion in damage, breaking the old record of 22 sets in 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday. The number of these costly disasters, adjusted for inflation, has risen sharply from an average of just three a year in the 1980s to just under six a year in the 1990s.
Last year’s billion dollar US disasters included a drought, four floods, 19 major storms, 2 hurricanes, a wildfire and a winter storm. They combined to kill 492 people and cause nearly $93 billion in damage, according to NOAA.
Antarctic sea ice hit record lows in 2023 and broke an eight-month record for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.
Copernicus calculated that the average global temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. Although that seems like a small amount in world record keeping, it is a very large margin it for the new record, said Burgess. The average Earth temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus calculated.
“It’s been a great seven months. We had the hottest June, July, August, September, October, November, December,” Burgess said. “It was just a season or a month that was exceptional. He was exceptional for more than half the year.”
There are a number of factors that made 2023 the warmest year on record, but the biggest factor by far was the ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that accompany heat, Burgess said. These gases come from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
Other factors include the natural El Nino – a temporary warming of the central Pacific Ocean that changes the weather around the world – other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and volcanic eruptions under sea in 2022 that sent water vapor into the atmosphere. , Burgess said.
Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest are smaller causes.
Copernicus records only go back to 1940 and are based on a combination of observations and forecast models. Other groups, including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, the UK Meteorological Office and Berkeley Earth go back to the mid-1800s and will announce their calculations for 2023 on Friday, expecting outstanding marks.
The Japan Meteorological Agency, which uses similar techniques to Copernicus and goes back to 1948, late last month estimated the year to be the hottest at 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.64 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The University of Alabama Huntsville’s global data set, which uses satellite measurements rather than ground data and dates back to 1979, also found last year to be the warmest year on record, but not by as much.
Although actual observations only go back less than two centuries, some scientists say evidence from tree rings and ice cores suggests this is the warmest time on Earth in more than 100,000 years.
“It basically means that our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms, practically all human activities have not had to cope with this hot climate,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said at a press conference on Tuesday. “The last time the temperature was this high there were no cities, no books, no agriculture and no domesticated animals on this planet.”
For the first time, Copernicus recorded a day in which the global average was at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than in pre-industrial times. It happened twice and the third was a near miss around Christmas, Burgess said.
And for the first time, every day of the year was at least one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. For almost half the year – 173 days – the world was 1.5 degrees warmer than the mid-1800s.
Meinshausen, the Australian climate scientist, said it is natural for the public to wonder if the 1.5 degree target is missed. He said it’s important for people to continue trying to keep the heating safe.
“We’re not doing away with a speed limit, because somebody broke the speed limit,” he said. “We redouble our efforts to hit the brakes.”
But Buontempo said it will only get hotter: “Following the current trajectory in a few years the record year of 2023 will probably be remembered as a cold year.”
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