BRUSSELS, Belgium
The European Union's
Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) released its 2023 Global Climate
Highlights report on Tuesday, backing up scientific consensus that 2023 was the
hottest year on record.
Picture of the dried Canelon Grande reservoir just north of Canelones, in Uruguay on March 14, 2023.
The report shows 2023 had a
global average temperature of 14.9°C. This constitutes a 0.17°C global
increase, meaning 2023 overtakes 2016, the previous record-breaking year, by
"a large margin."
The high average temperatures
were tied to several drivers such as greenhouse gas concentrations and El Nino,
a warm phase in the Pacific Ocean, according to authors.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy
Director of C3S, said in a statement that "2023 was an exceptional year
with climate records tumbling like dominoes. Not only is 2023 the warmest year
on record, it is also the first year with all days over 1°C warmer than the
pre-industrial period."
"Temperatures during 2023
likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years," she
added.
Carlo Buontempo, director of
C3S, said that the findings have "profound consequences" for the
Paris Agreement.
"The extremes we have
observed over the last few months provide a dramatic testimony of how far we
now are from the climate in which our civilization developed," Buontempo
said.
Leaders from 196 countries
that have signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on
climate change, agreed to hold "the increase in the global average
temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels" and pursue efforts
"to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial
levels."
The UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued repeated warnings that an average
temperature increase topping the 1.5°C threshold risks "unleashing far
more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts,
heatwaves and rainfall."
2023 saw unprecedented
heatwaves in southern Europe, extreme drought in the Horn of Africa, record
winter highs in South America and weather exacerbating wildfires in Canada.
"Such events will
continue to get worse until we transfer away from fossil fuels and reach
net-zero emissions," said Ed Hawkins, climate change professor at the
University of Reading, who did not contribute to the report. "We will
continue to suffer the consequences of our inactions today for
generations."
Almost half of 2023 exceeded
the 1.5°C limit, and some scientists predict that the Earth's average surface
temperature is also likely to breach 1.5 C in 2024.
However, that would not
necessarily mean that the world failed to meet the Paris Agreement target, as
that would occur only after several successive years above the 1.5°C.
At one point in 2023, the
daily global temperature average briefly surpassed the pre-industrial levels by
more than 2°C.
In June 2023, temperature
anomalies spiked above the pre-industrial level 1.5°C for several days in a
row. Eventually, nearly half the days in 2023 were more than 1.5°C higher than
pre-industrial levels, as per the report. July and August 2023 were the warmest
two months on record.
December 2023 was the warmest
December on record globally, with an average temperature of 13.51°C — 0.85°C
above the 1991-2020 average.
Earth's sea surface
temperatures were "persistently and unusually high," the report said,
reaching record levels from April to December 2023.
This was because of marine
heatwaves around the globe including in parts of the Mediterranean, the Gulf of
Mexico, the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, North Pacific and much of North Atlantic.
Researchers have found
increased air temperatures, which transfer heat into the ocean, are making
marine heatwaves more frequent
Moreover, in the spring of
2023, the cooler oceanic phase La Nina came to an end and El Nino conditions
began to develop. For Europe, 2023 was the second-warmest year — 0.17°C cooler
than 2020.
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