by The hottest year in recorded history casts doubt on humanity’s ability to deal with its own climate crisis, senior scientists have said.
As historically high temperatures were registered in many parts of the world in late December, former NASA scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures came to light.
“When our children and grandchildren look back on the history of man-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point where governments’ emancipation in dealing with climate change will finally be revealed ,” he said. “Not only have governments failed to stop global warming, the rate of global warming has accelerated.”
After the hottest July in probably 120,000 years, Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first high-profile exposé on global warming, warned that the world was moving towards a “limit new climate” with temperatures. higher than at any point in the past million years.
Now director of the climate program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope is an intergenerational change in leadership. “The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people understand that they must be in charge of their future. “Perhaps the turbulent status of today’s politics will provide opportunities,” he said.
His comments reflect the dismay of experts at the huge gap between scientific warnings and political action. It took nearly 30 years for world leaders to admit that fossil fuels are the cause of the climate crisis, but this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a vague and vague call for “transition”, even from them as evidence. grows that the world is already warming to dangerous levels.
Scientists are still processing data from this blistering year. The latest to mention it in its record was the Japanese meteorological agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 at 0.53C above the global average between 1991 and 2020. This was significantly higher than the previous record set in 2016, when the temperature was 0.35C above that. average. In the long term, the world is about 1.2C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously calculated that there was a “greater than 99% chance” that 2023 would be the warmest year in its 174-year data set. This followed six warm months in a row, including the warmest summer and autumn in the northern hemisphere.
Driven by human-caused global warming and El Niño, the heat refused to let up. In November, there was an even greater anomaly, with two days warmer than 2C above the pre-industrial average, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
It also confirmed the annual record, as held by the World Meteorological Organization. In December, many parts of the world experienced their warmest Christmas ever. As the new year approached, monthly temperature records were still being set in Central Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.
Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will almost certainly be 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual measurements, many scientists say it is likely only a matter of time before the world exceeds the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement.
Old-fashioned climate watchers are alarmed by the speed of change. “The climate year 2023 is simply terrible, in terms of the number of climate events, from heat waves, droughts, floods and fires, to the rate of ice melting and temperature anomalies especially in the ocean,” said Professor Johan Rockström, co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
He said that these new developments showed that the Earth was in uncharted territory and under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be seeing a shift in the Earth’s response to 250 years of increasing human pressure … to a state of ‘payback’ where the Earth starts sending invoices back to the a thin layer on the Earth where people live, in the extreme form off the charts.”
Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests that could tip the planet into a state where human efforts to reduce emissions becoming more futile.
Five years later, he said the thing that bothered him the most in 2023 was the sharp increase in sea surface temperature, which was sudden even in an El Niño year.
“We don’t understand why the increase in the temperature of the ocean is so great, and we don’t know what the consequences will be in the future,” he said. “Are we seeing the first signs of a change of state? Or is it [a] freak outlier?”
In the Antarctic, scientists are bewildered and worried about the pace of change. Brazil’s new scientific module Criosfera 2, a solar and wind laboratory that collects meteorological information, measured the lowest sea ice extent in the region for both summer and winter. “This environmental alert is a sign of ongoing global environmental changes and poses a daunting challenge for polar scientists to explain,” said Francisco Eliseu Aquino, professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and vice- director of the University of Brazil. polar center and climate.
West Antarctica has been affected by several winter heat waves associated with landfall of atmospheric rivers. In early July, the Chilean team on King George Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, recorded an unprecedented rain event in the middle of the Australian winter when only snowfall is expected. In January, a huge iceberg, about 1,500 square kilometers, broke off from the Brunt ice shelf in the Weddell Sea. This was the third giant cub in the same region in three years.
Aquino said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – has created an “alarming” dynamic between the poles and the tropics. Cold and wet fronts from the Antarctic interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and returned with equally devastating force in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record” was a taste of what was to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards, we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5C [of heating] in the average global temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.
This is already happening. The deadliest climate disaster this year was the flooding in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In one day, Storm Daniel dropped 200 times the amount of rain that normally falls on the city in the entire month of September. This was 50 times more likely due to human-caused climate change.
Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and about 100 people were killed in Lahaina on the island of Maui, the deadliest wildfire in US history, which occurred in August. For those who prefer to calculate a disaster in economic terms, the United States broke its annual record of billion dollar disasters by August, and by then there were already 23.
Raul Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said the effects of this year’s heat were felt across South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in Uruguay, record-breaking fires in Chile, the most intense. a drought in the Amazon basin for 50 years, a prolonged power shortage in Ecuador due to the lack of hydropower, and increased shipping costs along the Panama canal due to low water levels.
Cordero said El Niño was forecast to taper off in the coming year, but above-average or higher temperatures are likely to persist for at least the next three months.
And, as science has proven beyond doubt, the earth’s temperature will continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests. In the years to come, the “anomaly” of heat and disasters of 2023 would first be the new norm, and then it would be looked back on as one of the cooler and more stable years in human existence. As Hansen warned, unless there is rapid radical change, the climate system will fail.
