2023 hottest year on record as Earth nears 1.5C limit

Climate change has intensified heatwaves, droughts and wildfires across the planet, and pushed the global thermometer 1.48 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial benchmark, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported and “It is also the first year with all days over one degree warmer than the pre-industrial period,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Nearly half the year exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit, beyond which climate impacts are more likely to become self-reinforcing and catastrophic, according to scientists. But even if Earth’s average surface temperature breaches 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2024, as some scientists predict, it does not mean the world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of capping global warming under that threshold.

The year 2023 saw massive fires in Canada, extreme droughts in the Horn of Africa or the Middle East, unprecedented summer heatwaves in Europe, the United States and China, along with record winter warmth in Australia and South America.

The Copernicus findings come one month after a climate agreement was reached at COP28 in Dubai calling for the gradual transition away from fossil fuels, the main cause of climate warming.

The year saw another ominous record: two days in November 2023 exceeded the preindustrial benchmark by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Copernicus predicted that the 12-month period ending in January or February 2024 would “exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level”.

Reliable weather records date back to 1850, but older proxy data for climate change - from tree rings, ice cores and sediment - show that 2023 temperatures “exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years”, Burgess said. Ocean temperatures globally were also “persistently and unusually high”, with many seasonal records broken since April.

These unprecedented ocean temperatures caused marine heatwaves devastating to aquatic life and boosted the intensity of storms. Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of excess heat caused by human activity and play a major role in regulating Earth’s climate.

Rising temperatures have also accelerated the melting of ice shelves - frozen ridges that help prevent massive glaciers in Greenland and West Antarctica from slipping into the ocean and raising sea levels. “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 civilization developed”, said Carlo Buontempo, C3S director.

In 2023, carbon dioxide and methane concentrations reached record levels of 419 parts per million, and 1,902 parts per billion, respectively. Methane is the second largest contributor to global warming after CO2, and is responsible for around 30 percent of the rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution, according to UNEP.

Source: Agence France-Presse