We started off the year 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–and it looks like we’re ending the year on that same warm note.
New climate data from The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows that this past October was the warmest one on record globally, with an average surface temperature of 59.54ºF over the period, and 2023 is “virtually certain” to be the hottest in observational history.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S, stated:
October 2023 has seen exceptional temperature anomalies, following on from four months of global temperature records being obliterated. We can say with near certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, and is currently 1.43ºC above the preindustrial average. The sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into COP28 has never been higher.
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.
What that means is that 2023 is well on its way to be named the warmest year ever recorded, a title that has otherwise been held by the year 2016.
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 and a strengthening El Niño event.”
And 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 September’s Category 5 Hurricane Lee, 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.”