Even warmer than expected, 2023 was the hottest year on record

It comes as no surprise to anyone who sweated through it: 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Average surface temperatures rose nearly 0.2°C above the previous record, set in 2016, to 1.48°C over preindustrial levels, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported today . Only Australia was spared record-setting heat. The extreme conditions are a “dramatic testimony of how far we now are from the climate in which our civilization developed,” said Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus’s director, in a statement. Yet 2023’s record temperatures—likely to be confirmed later this week by analyses from NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United Kingdom’s Met Office, and Berkeley Earth—come with a mystery. Humanity’s unabated burning of fossil fuels is the dominant driver of the long-term trend, but it is insufficient to explain 2023’s sudden spike, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University. One exacerbating factor was the end of a La Niña climate pattern, which from 2020 to 2022 stirred up an increased amount of deep cold water in the eastern Pacific Ocean that absorbed heat and suppressed global temperatures. In 2023, the pattern flipped into an El Niño event, which blanketed the equatorial Pacific with warm waters and began to boost global temperatures. But the flip is not enough to explain 2023’s record, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news