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11-01-2024
LONDON/ NEW YORK: The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Nino weather event.
Last year was about 1.48C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU’s climate service says.
Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, media shows.
Sea surface temperatures have also smashed previous highs.
The Met Office reported last week that the UK experienced its second warmest year on record in 2023.
These global records are bringing the world closer to breaching key international climate targets.
“What struck me was not just that [2023] was record-breaking, but the amount by which it broke previous records,” notes Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.
The margin of some of these records which you can see on the chart below is “really astonishing”, Prof Dessler says, considering they are averages across the whole world.
It’s well-known that the world is much warmer now than 100 years ago, as humans keep releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere but 12 months ago, no major science body actually 
predicted 2023 being the hottest year on record, because of the complicated way in which the Earth’s climate behaves.
During the first few months of the year, only a small number of days broke air temperature records but the world then went on a remarkable, almost unbroken streak of daily records in the second half of 2023.
Look at the calendar chart below, where each block represents a day in 2023. Records were broken on the days colored in the darkest shade of red. From June, we’re looking at a new record most days.
More than 200 days saw a new daily global temperature record for the time of year, according to media Copernicus Climate Change Service data.
This recent temperature boost is mainly linked to the rapid switch to El Niño conditions, which has occurred on top of long-term human-caused warming.
El Nino is a natural event where warmer surface waters in the East Pacific Ocean release additional heat into the atmosphere. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
