by The hottest year on record casts doubt on humanity’s ability to cope with a climate crisis of its own making, top scientists have said.
As historically high temperatures continued to be recorded in many parts of the world in late December, former NASA scientist James Hansen told The Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when the failures became apparent.
“As our children and grandchildren look back on the history of human-caused climate change, this year and next will be seen as the tipping point in which the futility of governments in addressing climate change was finally exposed,” he claimed. “Not only have governments failed to stop global warming, but the pace of global warming has actually accelerated.”
After what was likely the hottest July in 120,000 years, Hansen, whose testimony before the US Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first high-profile revelation about global warming, warned that the world was moving toward a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any time during the last million years.
Now director of the climate program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope was a generational change in leadership. “The positive side of this clear dichotomy is that young people can realize that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent situation of current politics can provide opportunities,” he stated.
His comments reflect dismay among experts at the yawning gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to recognize that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis; However, this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a weak and vague call for a “transition” away from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already warming to dangerous levels.
Scientists are still processing data from this whirlwind year. The latest to claim it will be a record was the Japanese meteorological agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 at 0.53°C above the global average between 1991 and 2020. This was well above the previous record set in 2016, when temperatures they were 0.35°C above that. average. In the longer term, the world’s temperature will be about 1.2°C higher than in pre-industrial times.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously estimated there was a “greater than 99% chance” that 2023 would be the hottest year in its 174-year data set. This followed six consecutive warm months, including the warmest summers and autumns in the northern hemisphere.
Driven by man-made global warming and El Niño, the heat refused to relent. In November, there was an even larger anomaly, with two days warmer than 2°C above the pre-industrial average, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service.
It has also already confirmed the annual record, as has the World Meteorological Organization. In December, many parts of the world experienced the hottest Christmas ever. As the new year approaches, monthly temperature records continue to be broken in Central Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.
Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will almost certainly be 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual measurements, many scientists say it is probably only a matter of time before the world exceeds the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement.
Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “Climate year 2023 is nothing short of shocking, in terms of the intensity of climate events, from heat waves, droughts, floods and fires, to the pace of ice melting and temperature anomalies, especially in the ocean,” said Professor Johan Rockström, deputy director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
He said these new developments indicated that Earth was in uncharted territory and under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be seeing a shift in the Earth’s response to 250 years of intensified human pressures… to a ‘revenge’ situation in which the Earth begins to send bills to the thin layer of the Earth where humans live, in the form of extremes out of the ordinary.”
Rockstrom was one of the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests that could push the planet to a state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will become increasingly useless.
Five years later, he said what worried him most in 2023 was the sharp rise in sea surface temperatures, which have been steep even for an El Niño year.
“We don’t understand why the increase in ocean heat is so dramatic and we don’t know what the consequences will be in the future,” he said. “Are we seeing the first signs of a change of state? Or is that [a] An outlier?
In Antarctica, scientists have also been perplexed and concerned about the pace of change. The new Brazilian scientific module Criosfera 2, a solar and wind energy laboratory that collects meteorological information, measured the smallest extent of sea ice in the region for both summer and winter. “This environmental alert is a sign of ongoing global environmental changes and poses an enormous challenge for polar scientists to explain,” said Francisco Eliseu Aquino, professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and deputy director of the University of Brazil. polar and climatic center.
West Antarctica was affected by several winter heat waves associated with the landfall of atmospheric rivers. In early July, a Chilean team on King George Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, recorded an unprecedented rainfall event in the middle of the southern winter when only snowfall is expected. In January, a huge iceberg, measuring about 1,500 square kilometers, broke off from the Brunt Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea. It was the third colossal birth in the same region in three years.
Aquino said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “terrifying” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold, wet fronts from Antarctica had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in the middle. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with equally devastating force in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record” was a sign of what was to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming. “Starting this year we will concretely understand what it means to flirt with 1.5°C. [of heating] in global average temperature and new disaster records,” he said.
This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times more rain than typically falls on the city during the entire month of September. Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.
Wildfires burned a record acreage in Canada and Europe and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on the island of Maui, the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history in August. For those who prefer to calculate the catastrophe in economic terms, the United States broke its annual record for billion-dollar disasters in August, when 23 had already occurred.
Raúl Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said the effects of this year’s heat were being felt across South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in Uruguay, unprecedented fires in Chile, the most severe drought in the Amazon Basin in 50 years, prolonged power shortages in Ecuador caused by a lack of hydroelectric power, and increased shipping costs along the Panama Canal due to low water levels.
Cordero said El Niño is forecast to weaken next year, but above-average or record temperatures are likely to persist for at least the next three months.
And, as science has proven beyond a doubt, global temperatures will continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests. In the years to come, the heat “anomaly” and catastrophes of 2023 would first become the new norm, and then be considered one of the coldest and most stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warned, unless there is radical and rapid change, failure will be built into the climate system.
