The hottest year in recorded history has cast doubt on humanity’s ability to cope with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.
As historically high temperatures continue to be recorded in many parts of the world in late December, former NASA scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 will be remembered as the moment when the failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-caused climate change, this year and next year will be seen as a turning point where the inability of governments to combat climate change was finally revealed,” he said. “Not only have governments failed to stop global warming, the rate of global warming has actually accelerated.”
Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is considered the first high-profile statement of global warming, warned that the world was heading towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures rising after what was likely the hottest July in 120,000 years. higher than at any point in the past million years.
The best hope is a generational change in leadership, said Hansen, who is now director of the climate program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York. “The bright side of this apparent dilemma is that young people can realize that they must take responsibility for their future. “The turbulent state of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.
His comments reflect dismay among experts at the enormous gap between scientific warnings and political action. It took almost 30 years for world leaders to accept that fossil fuels were responsible for the climate crisis; but this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a loose and vague call to “move away” from fossil fuels. The world already appears to be warming to dangerous levels.
Scientists are still processing data from this glorious year. The last person to state that this would be a record was the Japan Meteorological Agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 by 0.53°C above the global average between 1991 and 2020. This was well above the previous record for temperatures set in 2016. average. In the long term, the world is about 1.2 degrees warmer than in pre-industrial times.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously calculated that there was a “more than 99% chance” that 2023 would be the warmest year in the 174-year data set. This followed six consecutive record warm months, including the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer and autumn.
The temperature refused to decrease due to human-induced global warming and the effect of El Niño. An even bigger anomaly occurred in November, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service; It was two days warmer, 2 degrees above the pre-industrial average.
It has already confirmed the annual record, as has the World Meteorological Organization. In December, many parts of the world experienced their warmest Christmas ever. As the new year approached, monthly temperature records were still being broken in Central Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.
Berkeley Earth predicts that average temperatures in 2023 will be almost 1.5 degrees higher 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 surpasses the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious goals.
Experienced climate watchers are dismayed by the pace of change. “Climate year 2023 is nothing short of shocking in terms of the strength of climate events, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to the rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies, especially in the ocean,” said Joint Director Prof Johan Rockström. The statement from the Potsdam Climate Impact Research Institute in Germany is as follows:
He said that these new developments show that the Earth is in an unexplored region 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 increasing human pressures towards a ‘payback’ state in which the Earth begins to send bills into the thin layer where humans live at unusual extremes.”
Rockstrom was among the authors of a 2018 “Greenhouse World” paper that warned that melting ice, warming seas and vanishing forests could lead to a domino-like cascade that would plunge the planet into a situation where human efforts to reduce emissions would increasingly fail.
Five years later, he said what bothered him most in 2023 was the sharp rise in sea surface temperatures, which was sudden even for an El Niño year.
“We don’t understand why the increase in ocean temperature 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 state change? Or is it? [a] Is the freak out of line?”
Scientists in Antarctica were also stunned and alarmed by the pace of change. Brazil’s new scientific module Criosfera 2, a solar- and wind-powered laboratory that collects meteorological information, measured the lowest sea ice extent in the region in both summer and winter. “This environmental warning is a sign of ongoing global environmental changes and poses a daunting 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 Brazilian Institute of Sciences. . polar and climate center.
West Antarctica has been 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 Australian winter, when only snowfall is expected. In January, a massive iceberg measuring approximately 1,500 square kilometers broke away from the Brunt ice shelf in the Weddell Sea. This was the third massive calving in the same area in three years.
Aquino said human impact through the burning of fossil fuels is also creating “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold rain fronts in Antarctica interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon, creating unprecedented storms in between. Flooding in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with similar devastating force in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record record” is an indication of what’s to come as the world enters dangerous levels of warming. “Starting this year, we will concretely understand what flirting with 1.5C means. [of heating] “There is an increase in global average temperature and new records in terms of disasters,” he said.
This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in the Libyan coastal city of Derna, which killed more than 11,300 people. In a single day, Storm Daniel dumped 200 times as much rain on the city as in the entire month of September. Human-induced climate change has increased this probability by up to 50 times.
Wildfires have burned a record area in Canada and Europe and killed nearly 100 people in the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, which occurred in Lahaina on the island of Maui in August. For those who prefer to calculate disasters in economic terms, the United States broke its annual record for billion-dollar disasters in August; Meanwhile, 23 disasters had already occurred.
Raul Cordero, climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said that the effects of this year’s heat were felt in South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in Uruguay and record-breaking fires in Chile. 50-year drought in the Amazon basin, long-term power outages in Ecuador caused by a lack of hydropower, and increased shipping costs through the Panama Canal due to low water levels.
El Niño is expected to weaken next year, but above-average or record temperatures are likely to continue for at least the next three months, Cordero said.
And as science has proven beyond any doubt, global temperatures will continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests. In the coming years, the temperature “anomaly” and disasters of 2023 will first become the new norm, then be looked back on as one of the cooler, more stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warns, unless there is radical and rapid change, failure will become embedded in the climate system.