The year 2023 was the hottest in recorded human history, Europe’s top climate agency announced Tuesday, with blistering surface temperatures and torrid ocean conditions pushing the planet dangerously close to a long-feared warming threshold.
According to new data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Earth’s average temperature last year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the preindustrial average, before humans began to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and other polluting activities. Last year shattered the previous global temperature record by almost two-tenths of a degree — the largest jump scientists have ever observed.
The announcement of a new temperature record comes as little surprise to scientists who have witnessed the past 12 months of raging wildfires, deadly ocean heat waves, cataclysmic flooding and a worrisome Antarctic thaw. A scorching summer and “gobsmacking” autumn temperature anomalies had all but guaranteed that 2023 would be a year for the history books.
But the amount by which the previous record was broken shocked even climate experts.
“I don’t think anybody was expecting anomalies as large as we have seen,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said. “It was on the edge of what was plausible.”
The staggering new statistics underscore how human-caused climate change has allowed regular planetary fluctuations to push temperatures into uncharted territory. Each of the past eight years was already among the eight warmest ever observed. Then, a complex and still somewhat mysterious host of climatic influences combined with human activities to [push 2023 even hotter — ushering in an age of “global boiling,”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/31/2023-record-heat-temperatures/?itid=lk_inline_manual_8) in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres.
Unless nations transform their economies and rapidly transition away from polluting fuels, experts warn, this level of warming will unravel ecological webs and cause human-built systems to collapse.
It’s likely that the two biggest contributors to the apparent acceleration in warming are:
1. A transition from La Nina to El Nino. El Nino generally correlates with higher global temperatures.
2. [Policies implemented in 2020 that reduced the sulphur content of international shipping fuel.](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/#:~:text=The%20new%20rules%20lowered%20the,for%20all%20ships%20operating%20worldwide.) High sulphur content in fuels is cheaper, but the emitted SO2 acts as a nucleus for cloud formation, which then falls to the ground as acid rain. But these clouds also reflect radiation and reduce the heat reaching Earth. New regulations reduced the maximum sulphur content in fuels by a factor of 7. This is also the reason for the terrifying charts seen early this year where sea surface temperatures were way, way higher than even the previous record.
It’s undoubtedly a good thing to reduce the impacts of acid rain, but it had the consequence of accelerating global heating.
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The year 2023 was the hottest in recorded human history, Europe’s top climate agency announced Tuesday, with blistering surface temperatures and torrid ocean conditions pushing the planet dangerously close to a long-feared warming threshold.
According to new data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Earth’s average temperature last year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the preindustrial average, before humans began to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and other polluting activities. Last year shattered the previous global temperature record by almost two-tenths of a degree — the largest jump scientists have ever observed.
This year is [predicted to be even hotter](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/02/record-heat-2024-el-nino/?itid=ap_scottdance&itid=lk_inline_manual_4). By the end of January or February, the agency warned, the planet’s 12-month average temperature is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level — blasting past the world’s most ambitious climate goal.
The announcement of a new temperature record comes as little surprise to scientists who have witnessed the past 12 months of raging wildfires, deadly ocean heat waves, cataclysmic flooding and a worrisome Antarctic thaw. A scorching summer and “gobsmacking” autumn temperature anomalies had all but guaranteed that 2023 would be a year for the history books.
But the amount by which the previous record was broken shocked even climate experts.
“I don’t think anybody was expecting anomalies as large as we have seen,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said. “It was on the edge of what was plausible.”
The staggering new statistics underscore how human-caused climate change has allowed regular planetary fluctuations to push temperatures into uncharted territory. Each of the past eight years was already among the eight warmest ever observed. Then, a complex and still somewhat mysterious host of climatic influences combined with human activities to [push 2023 even hotter — ushering in an age of “global boiling,”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/31/2023-record-heat-temperatures/?itid=lk_inline_manual_8) in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres.
Unless nations transform their economies and rapidly transition away from polluting fuels, experts warn, this level of warming will unravel ecological webs and cause human-built systems to collapse.
**Read more:** [**https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/09/record-hot-year-2023-global-temperatures/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/09/record-hot-year-2023-global-temperatures/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)
2023: the year the hockey stick hit us.
It’s likely that the two biggest contributors to the apparent acceleration in warming are:
1. A transition from La Nina to El Nino. El Nino generally correlates with higher global temperatures.
2. [Policies implemented in 2020 that reduced the sulphur content of international shipping fuel.](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/#:~:text=The%20new%20rules%20lowered%20the,for%20all%20ships%20operating%20worldwide.) High sulphur content in fuels is cheaper, but the emitted SO2 acts as a nucleus for cloud formation, which then falls to the ground as acid rain. But these clouds also reflect radiation and reduce the heat reaching Earth. New regulations reduced the maximum sulphur content in fuels by a factor of 7. This is also the reason for the terrifying charts seen early this year where sea surface temperatures were way, way higher than even the previous record.
It’s undoubtedly a good thing to reduce the impacts of acid rain, but it had the consequence of accelerating global heating.