The summer of 2023 recorded the highest average global temperatures ever measured, the European Copernicus observatory announced on Wednesday, which predicts that this year will probably be the hottest year in history, reports AFP, quoted by News.ro.
“The climate collapse has begun”, warned the head of the UN, António Guterres, in a statement. Heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires hit Asia, Europe and North America during this period, in dramatic and often unprecedented proportions, with the price paid in human lives and damage to economies and the environment. Nor was the southern hemisphere, where several heat records were broken in the middle of the southern winter, spared. “The June-July-August 2023 season, which corresponds to summer in the Northern Hemisphere, where the vast majority of the world‘s population lives, was by far the warmest ever recorded globally, with a global average temperature of 16.77°C,” he announced Copernicus, according to News.ro.
This is 0.66°C above the 1991-2020 average, which has already been marked by an increase in the global average temperature due to global warming caused by human activity. Also, the new average value in the summer of 2023 is well – by 2 tenths – above the previous record set in 2019. “Climate collapse has begun,” UN chief António Guterres said in a statement. July was the hottest month ever recorded, and August 2023 is now the second hottest, according to Copernicus. In the first eight months of the year, the average global temperature is just 0.01°C behind 2016, the warmest year on record. But that record hangs by a thread, given seasonal forecasts and the return of the El Niño climate phenomenon in the Pacific, which is synonymous with further warming.
2023, the hottest year in history
“Given the excess heat from the surface of the oceans, it is likely that 2023 will be the warmest year (…) that humanity has ever known,” Samantha Burgess, deputy head of the Copernicus climate change service, told AFP.
The Copernicus database dates back to 1940, but it can be compared with climates of past millennia, established using tree rings or ice cores and summarized in the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On that basis, “the three months we just went through are the warmest in 120,000 years, in other words since the beginning of human history,” says Burgess. Despite three consecutive years of La Niña, the opposite of El Niño that partially moderated warming, the years 2015-2022 were already the warmest on record.
The world’s oceans are overheating. With what effects
The warming of the world‘s seas, which continue to absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by human activity since the industrial age, plays a major role in this phenomenon. Since April, their average surface temperature has risen to unprecedented levels. From July 31 to August 31, it surpassed the previous record set in March 2016 every day, notes Copernicus, reaching the unprecedented symbolic threshold of 21°C, well above all records.
“Warming oceans lead to a warming of the atmosphere and an increase in humidity, which leads to more intense rain and more energy available for tropical cyclones,” points out Samantha Burgess. Overheating also affects biodiversity. There are fewer nutrients in the ocean and less oxygen, which threatens the survival of flora and fauna, adds the researcher, who also cites coral bleaching, the proliferation of harmful algae and the potential collapse of reproductive cycles.
“Temperatures will continue to rise as long as we don’t close the tap on emissions”, mainly from the burning of coal, oil and gas, points out Samantha Burgess three months before the COP28 meeting in Dubai. This United Nations Climate Conference, where a bitter fight for the end of fossil fuels is expected, should put humanity back on the path of the Paris Agreement: limiting global warming to well below 2°C and, if possible, to 1.5 °C, compared to the pre-industrial era.
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