(CNN) — Global warming reached 1.48 degrees Celsius in 2023, data released on Tuesday showed, as the hottest year on record pushed the world to within just a hundredth of a degree of a critical climate threshold.
Analyzes from last year already confirmed that 2023 was the hottest on record, but this Tuesday’s data shows an alarming jump in heat compared to 2016, the previous hottest year. In 2023, the average global temperature was 14.98 degrees Celsius (0.17 degrees above the previous record), while the temperature of the world’s oceans also reached a new high.
In 2023, scientists repeatedly expressed shock as continued warming records fell and warned that the world was moving dangerously close to the 1.5 degree limit that nearly 200 countries sought to avoid in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Data and analysis published by Copernicus (the EU’s climate and weather monitoring agency) say global warming could worsen as early as this year, predicting that the 12-month period ending in January or February will exceed 1.5 degrees.
But scientists are more concerned about long-term temperatures of 1.5 degrees or more than individual years. Above that threshold, many of Earth’s ecosystems will struggle to adapt, and summer heat will reach the limits of human survival in some places.
The record warming of 2023 was caused primarily by climate change, Copernicus said, but was exacerbated by the El Niño phenomenon, a natural climate variability that increases the warming of the Pacific Ocean and global temperatures in general.
While some scientists have said that the 1.48 degree warming is in line with last year’s heat record, others are still puzzled by how much warmer 2023 was compared to previous years.
“It’s amazing that this year has indisputably broken the global temperature record,” said Bill Collins, a professor of climate processes at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. “There is no room to argue about hundredths of a degree; beating the previous record by 0.17 degrees should be a wake-up call for everyone.”
Every day in 2023, the global average temperature was at least 1 degree higher than the corresponding day in the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, Copernicus said. This has been reported for the first time.
According to historical Copernicus temperature data, global temperatures have risen steadily since the 1970s, until 2015 exceeded 1 degree of global warming for the first time. It took only eight years to jump more than half a degree above pre-industrial levels.
Even compared to the past three decades, when temperatures have been warmer, the year 2023 is different. The year was 0.6 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for the period 1991-2020.
Temperatures are rising “more rapidly”.
Liz Bentley, chief executive of the United Kingdom’s Royal Meteorological Society, said that, several months ago, the scientific community estimated that warming would reach about 1.3 degrees in 2023. That forecast has been “destroyed”, he said, as regional, national and international temperature records have fallen worldwide, including daily and monthly records.
An aerial view shows a child walking on the dry bed of Lake Alhajuela during the summer drought, in Colon province, 50 km north of Panama City, on April 21, 2023. (Photo by LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images)
Other thresholds are also being crossed: two days in November were, for the first time, warmer than 2 degrees. Every month of 2023, between June and December, was the hottest month on record. July and August were the first and second warmest on record overall, Copernicus said.
Given the record decline, Bentley said, what was surprising was not so much the 1.48-degree temperature rise as the pace of climate change in recent years.
“If you look at the climate projections, when we expect to see a temperature change of close to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it’s actually sooner than many people expect,” Bentley told CNN. “We’ve definitely seen an acceleration towards that, rather than a sort of linear progression. It seems to be growing even faster.”
The Copernicus data show that the average annual air temperature was the highest or nearly the highest on record in all ocean basins and on all continents except Australia. This rise in temperature covers almost the entire world map.
The year of record heat, which saw deadly extreme weather events including wildfires in Canada, Hawaii and southern Europe, “gave us a glimpse of climate extremes happening closer to the Paris targets,” said Brian Hoskins, president of the Grantham Institute at Imperial. College London.
“It should shake the complacency shown in the actions of most governments around the world,” he said.
The world’s oceans also experienced unprecedented warming and were unusually warm in 2023. Sea surface temperatures were 0.44 degrees above the 1991-2020 average, the highest on record and a jump from the 0.26 degrees increase seen in 2016, the second warmest year.
Fossil fuel pollution is the main long-term factor behind the alarming ocean warming, but El Nino, which began in July, also contributed. Higher sea surface temperatures can lead to more powerful hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones.
At the end of the hottest year on record, nearly 200 countries represented at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai last month agreed for the first time to contribute to the global transition away from fossil fuels, the main cause of the climate crisis. The deal was widely welcomed, but critics say it contains loopholes that would allow major fossil fuel-producing nations to do less.
These photos, taken in 2007 and 2022, show the retreat of the Solheimjökull glacier in Iceland. It is estimated that the rate of glacier melting has doubled in the last two decades due to global warming. Credit: © 2023 James Balog/Earth Vision Institute
Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said, “The extremes we have seen in recent months bear dramatic witness to how far we are now from the environment in which our civilization developed.” “This has serious consequences for the Paris Agreement and all humanitarian endeavours. “If we are to successfully manage our portfolio of climate risks, we urgently need to decarbonise our economy while using climate data and insights to prepare for the future.”
