Last year started on a warm note with January being the warmest recorded January in NYC to date, and those warm temperatures carried through to April when NYC smashed an 82-year-old record with 90° temperatures.
2023 also ended on a warm note, after climate data from The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed that last October was the warmest one on record globally and New Year’s Eve weekend temperatures were 10-13°F higher than normal.
Consequentially, back in November 2023 C3S stated that 2023 was “virtually certain” to be the hottest year in observational history, and now it’s official.
As recorded by C3S, global temperatures reached exceptionally high levels in 2023 with a global average temperature of 58.96°F, overtaking by a large margin 2016, the previous warmest year.
In fact, each month from June to December in 2023 was warmer than the corresponding month in any previous year.
To give you an idea of how many years 2023 had to compete with for this title, C3S’s global temperature data records date back to 1850.
To come to these conclusions data is collected through measuring satellites, ships, aircraft, and weather stations around the world, all which show the global mean temperature as the highest ever on record.
According to CNBC, “climate scientists said the findings are ‘like something out of a Hollywood movie'” and attributed the rise in global temperatures to ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, a strengthening El Niño event, and other natural variations.
Greenhouse gas concentrations in 2023, for example, reached the highest levels ever recorded, and surface air temperatures broke several records globally in 2023.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S, stated how the “sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into COP28 has never been higher.”
That’s because rising temperatures can, as we know, have catastrophic effects on the planet.
Peter Schlosser, vice president and vice provost of the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, stated “a warmer planet means more extreme and intense weather events like severe drought or hurricanes that hold more water,” according to ABC7.
These effects were clearly seen not only with the Category 5 Hurricane Lee that occurred in September 2023, but also the torrential downpours that caused Governor Hochul to declare a State of Emergency on NYC that same month, among other natural disasters.
Schlosser continued on to say:
This is a clear sign that we are going into a climate regime that will have more impact on more people. We better take this warning that we actually should have taken 50 years ago or more and draw the right conclusions.
According to ABC7, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, stated, “It’s so much more expensive to keep burning these fossil fuels than it would be to stop doing it. That’s basically what it shows. And of course, you don’t see that when you just look at the records being broken and not at the people and systems that are suffering, but that – that is what matters.”
The full 2023 Global Climate highlights can be seen here.