Climate crisis
Catastrophic events included flash floods in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America
The hottest year in history raises doubts about humanity's ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, top scientists said.
As historically high temperatures continued 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 failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back on the history of man-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as a turning point where the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only have governments failed to curb global warming, but the pace of global warming has actually accelerated.”
After what was likely the hottest July in 120,000 years, Hansen, whose testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first sensational revelation of global warming, warned that the world was moving toward a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than ever previously in the last million years.
Hansen, now director of the climate program at Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York, said the best hope is for a generational change in leadership. “The positive thing about this clear dichotomy is that young people may realize that they need to take responsibility for their future. “The turbulent state of politics today could present opportunities,” he said.
James Hansen wants young people to take power and lead the world out of climate catastrophe. Photo: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
His comments reflect dismay among experts at the huge gap between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken nearly 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are responsible for the climate crisis, but this year's United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a vague and vague call for a “move away” from them fossil fuels, even as evidence grows that the world is already warming to dangerous levels.
Scientists are still processing data from that blistering year. The Japanese Meteorological Agency recently announced that it was a record. In 2023, it measured temperatures that were 0.53 °C above the global average between 1991 and 2020. This was well above the previous record set in 2016, when temperatures were 0.35°C above average. In the longer term, the world is around 1.2 °C hotter than in pre-industrial times.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had previously calculated that the probability that 2023 would be the hottest year was “more than 99%” in its 174-year data set. This was followed by six record warm months in a row, including the warmest summer and autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
Driven by human-caused global warming and El Niño, the heat showed no sign of letting up. There was an even bigger anomaly in November: two days were warmer than 2°C above the pre-industrial average, according to Europe's Copernicus climate change service.
A firefighter flees flames while trying to put out a forest fire near Athens in Greece, where the country has suffered greatly from heat waves and fires. Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images
It has already confirmed the annual record, as has the World Meteorological Organization. In December, many parts of the world experienced the hottest Christmas ever. As the new year approached, monthly temperature records were still being broken across Central Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.
Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will almost certainly be 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual measurements, many scientists say it is likely only a matter of time before the world exceeds the Paris Agreement's most ambitious goals.
Seasoned climate watchers were appalled by the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing short of shocking in terms of the magnitude of climatic events, from heat waves, droughts, floods and fires to the speed of ice melt and temperature anomalies, particularly in the ocean,” says Prof. Johan Rockström, co-director of Das Potsdam- Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany said.
He said these new developments indicate that Earth is in uncharted territory and is under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be witnessing a shift in Earth's response to 250 years of escalated human pressure… to a situation of 'payback' in which Earth begins sending bills back to the thin layer on Earth, in which people live in a form of extremes that cannot be found on the charts.”
It took almost 30 years for the Cop Conference to acknowledge the harm caused by fossil fuels. Photo: Amr Alfiky/Portal
Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 paper “Hothouse Earth,” which warned that a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests could plunge the planet into a state beyond which human efforts to reduce it of emissions will increasingly be in vain.
Five years later, he said what worried him most about 2023 was the sharp rise in sea surface temperatures, which was abrupt even for an El Niño year.
“We don't understand why the increase in ocean heat 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 government change? Or is it [a] Freak runaways?”
In Antarctica, too, scientists are confused and concerned about the pace of change. Brazil's new science module Criosfera 2, a solar and wind-powered laboratory that collects meteorological information, has measured the lowest sea ice extent in the region in both summer and winter. “This environmental warning is a sign of ongoing global environmental change and poses a monumental challenge for polar researchers to explain,” said Francisco Eliseu Aquino, professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and deputy director of Brazil’s University of Polar and Ocean Climate Center.
West Antarctica was affected by several winter heatwaves associated with 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 was expected. In January, a huge iceberg measuring about 1,500 square kilometers broke off from the Brunt Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea. It was the third giant calving in the same region in three years.
Aquino said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “terrifying” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from Antarctica had combined with record heat and drought in the Amazon, triggering unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September, and floods of similar devastating force occurred again in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record record” was a foretaste of what was to come if the world reached dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5°C [of heating] in global average temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.
This is already happening. The deadliest climate disaster this year was the flooding in Libya, which killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel dumped 200 times as much rain as would normally fall on the city in the entire month of September. Human-caused climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.
A memorial to some of the people killed in the Lahaina wildfire on the island of Maui. Photo: Lindsey Wasson/AP
Wildfires have burned a record area in Canada and Europe and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on the island of Maui. It was the deadliest forest fire in US history in August. For those who prefer to think of disasters in economic terms, the U.S. broke its annual record for billion-dollar disasters in August, with 23 already at that point.
Raul Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said the effects of this year's heat were being felt across South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in Uruguay and record-breaking fires in Chile, the worst drought in the Amazon basin in 50 years, persistent electricity shortages in Ecuador due to a lack of hydropower and increased shipping costs along the Panama Canal due to low water levels.
Cordero said El Niño is expected to weaken next year, but above-average or record temperatures are expected to persist for at least the next three months.
And as science has proven beyond a doubt, as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests, global temperatures would continue to rise. In the coming years, the heat anomaly and disasters of 2023 would first become the new norm and then be considered one of the cooler, more stable years of people's lives. As Hansen warned, without radical and rapid change, the climate system will fail.
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