The Extreme Climate and Weather Impacts of 2023: Forecasting and Predicting the Global Average Temperature to the 2024 Temperature
The global average temperature in 2023 was significantly warmer – by nearly three tenths of a degree Fahrenheit – than the previous warmest year, according to measurements released Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. European Union measurements released earlier this week came to a similar conclusion.
The global average includes temperatures measured throughout the year over both land and oceans, and changes are usually an order of magnitude smaller.
Climate driven storms killed many people in China, Mexico and southern Africa last year, despite being spared major damage in the U.S.
Fossil fuel burning is causing a lot of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses to be released into the atmosphere. There are some efforts to curb planet-warming pollution. The US’s greenhouse gas emissions dropped 2% last year, a decline which remains far short of the nation’s climate targets.
Still, forecasters are confident that El Niño conditions will persist well into 2024, potentially setting up another record-breaking year for the planet.
The Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service based in Exeter, is predicting that, in 2024, there is a good chance of the global average surface temperature passing the 1.5 °C mark. The pre-industrial average is 1.32 C above the Met Office analysis. Nick Dunstone, a climate scientist at the Met Office who led the work, says it is the first forecasting they’ve done. For one year, passing 1.5 C does not signify that the Paris agreement has been violated, but researchers say that the threshold needs to be surpassed for at least one decades to have formally broken the limit.
But the extreme climate and weather impacts of 2023 underscore how humanity has fundamentally altered the planet. If there isn’t action by the end of the century, Ruth Cerezo Mota warns, it will be a preview of what to come.
Spurred by climate change, the extreme weather of 2023 included category-5 Hurricane Otis, which slammed into the Mexican city of Acapulco, killing dozens of people. Wildfires in Quebec, Canada, in June and July poured smoke across major cities, including many in the midwestern and northeastern United States. Blazes raged across Greece in July and August, incinerating forests and killing a number of people. And on the Hawaiian island of Maui in August, a wildfire driven by high winds and invasive grasses killed at least 100 people.
Heatwaves also baked many parts of the world, with China recording its highest temperature ever and Phoenix, Arizona, experiencing 31 consecutive days at 43 °C (110 °F) or above. In Mexico, more than 200 people died in a heatwave in July, and a three-year drought in East Africa, exacerbated by climate change, has led to food insecurity and refugee movements.
Climate Change and the Unified Energies Agenda (Conference Report on Climate Change 2015) at the G8 summit in Los Alamos, Chile
At the end of the year, global leaders from the United Nations climate summit agreed for the first time to transition away from using fossil fuels for energy and many feel that it’s too little, too late.