It didn’t take them long to figure this out. Earlier this week, only nine days into the new year, a group of scientists at the European Union said that last year was the hottest year since people started keeping records in 1850, and it “most likely” was the hottest year ever.
Indeed, Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said that 2023 had been “an exceptional year…in a league of its own.” And this year could be worse.
At a press conference in Brussels, Copernicus scientists said that global temperatures started breaking records last June and then just kept going; every successive month was hotter than the same month in previous years.
The surging temperatures caused floods, wildfires, heatwaves and ocean rising around the world, the scientists said. The temperatures themselves were largely caused by humans through emissions from greenhouse gases. And 90 percent of the energy from greenhouse gases ends up in the oceans.
For the year, temperatures were 2.66 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were in the second half of the 19th Century. They were considerably higher than the previous record, in 2016.
The scientists said that they compared satellite readings last year with efforts to measure the temperature in the distant past by examining tree rings and air bubbles in glaciers, among other things, and determined that 2023 was the hottest year ever.
“There were simply no cities, no books, no agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high,” Buontempo said.
The Copernicus scientists said the record high temperatures could easily continue through this year. El Niño, responsible for shifting weather patterns in the tropical Pacific linked to global warming, didn’t even start until the middle of the year, and it is still continuing.
Sea surface temperatures around the world set records from April through December. Heatwaves were recorded last year in parts of the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, North Pacific, and much of the North Atlantic.
Every tenth of a degree of global warming strengthens heat waves and storms, melts glaciers and ice sheets and is responsible for rising sea levels.
You can read the Copernicus report here: https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2023
