Unprecedented temperatures foreshadow the future – Technologist

Dumbfounded but not at all surprised, scientists spent a whole year scrutinizing the red. For 12 months all over the world, in the air and oceans, in the heart of cities and at the highest peaks, temperature gauges skyrocketed. From a climatic point of view, the year 2023 broke all records, sweeping away the “seasonal normals” daily and setting the new standard for an increasingly near future. This was confirmed on Friday, January 12, by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), drawing on the work of the world’s leading institutes (NASA, the British MET, Berkeley Earth, etc.): “2023 is the warmest year on record, by a huge margin.” The annual average global temperature approached 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels – “symbolic because the Paris Agreement on climate change aims to limit the long-term temperature increase (averaged over decades rather than an individual year like 2023) to no more than 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” writes the organization.

On January 9, the European Copernicus Institute revealed that the global average had been 14.98°C, 1.48°C higher than in the years 1850-1900. “Humanity’s actions are scorching the Earth. 2023 was a mere preview of the catastrophic future that awaits if we don’t act now,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo added, “We are already taking action but we have to do more and we have to do it quickly. We have to make drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources.”

When we delve into the details, the 2023 record is staggering on several levels. The 2023 average is well above those of the previous record years, 2016 and 2020, which were already 1.29°C and 1.27°C above the pre-industrial era, according to the WMO. It was 0.60°C higher than in the 1991-2020 period, which is very recent, confirming the intensity of global warming. Every month from June to December broke absolute monthly temperature records and the +1.5°C mark was exceeded on average throughout the second half of the year, culminating in a monthly record in December of +1.78°C compared to the pre-industrial era. These figures do not render the Paris Agreement’s objective obsolete; it will only become so if the +1.5°C threshold is exceeded on average over several years. But it is a worrying signal.

Frightening ‘but not surprising’

“We are definitely out of the 20^th-century climate regime. It’s frightening to see this, but not surprising from a scientific point of view, as it’s all in line with the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] trajectories,” explained Sonia Seneviratne, a climatologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. “The urgent need is to limit the rise in global temperatures to as close to 1.5°C as possible, because beyond that, the probability of reaching global or regional climate tipping points increases, as does the disappearance of certain ecosystems, for example in the Mediterranean, even with warming limited to 2°C.”

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