2023 hottest recorded year as Earth nears key limit
BRUSSELS — Last year was the planet’s hottest on record by a substantial margin and likely the world’s warmest in the past 100,000 years, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Tuesday.
Scientists had widely expected the milestone, after climate records were repeatedly broken. Since June, every month has been the world’s hottest on record compared with the corresponding month in previous years.
“This has been a very exceptional year, climate-wise ... in a league of its own, even when compared to other very warm years,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said.
The agency confirmed 2023 as the hottest year in global temperature records going back to 1850. When checked against paleoclimatic data records from sources such as tree rings and air bubbles in glaciers, Buontempo said it was “very likely” the warmest year in the past 100,000 years.
On average, the planet was 1.48 degrees warmer in 2023 than in the 1850-1900 preindustrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5 degrees to avoid its most severe consequences.
The world has not breached that target — which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5 degrees over decades — but the Copernicus Climate Change Service said the temperatures had exceeded the level on nearly half of the days last year, setting “a dire precedent”.
Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change at Newcastle University in England, said the recordbreaking year underlined the need to act “extremely urgently” to reduce emissions.
“The speed of change in the political world and the will to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not matching the speed of change of extreme weather and warming,” she said.
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.
“We desperately need to rapidly cut fossil fuel use and reach net zero to preserve the liveable climate that we all depend on,” John Marsham, atmospheric science professor at the University of Leeds, said.