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Climate change: 2023 will be the hottest year on record!
Copernicus reports: 2024 is expected to be the first year with global warming of over 1.5 degrees since records began.
Climate change: 2023 will be the hottest year on record!
An alarming report from the EU climate change service Copernicus reveals that 2023 will be the first year on record that the global average temperature will be more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. With a forecast temperature of at least 1.55 degrees, this year will go down as the warmest in history. UN Secretary-General António Guterres had already spoken of a “climate collapse” in 2023, and the latest data confirms this dire prediction.
Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess described the current figures as a “new milestone” and called for them to serve as an incentive for the upcoming COP29 climate conference. But climate scientist Mojib Latif remains skeptical: “The COPs are obviously not effective,” he says and warns of another failure in Baku. While the international community set the goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees in Paris in 2015, the 1.5 degree limit is increasingly seen as unrealistic.
The urgency of net zero emissions
Experts consider the discussion about the 1.5 degree threshold to be irrelevant. Climate researcher Anders Levermann emphasizes that the key goal must be net zero emissions. Without an immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will continue to rise. Latif warns that the CO2 content in the atmosphere is rising inexorably and the earth is increasingly unable to absorb greenhouse gases. Even if all emissions were stopped immediately, global warming could increase by another half a degree in the coming decades.
The alarming data from Copernicus shows a clear trend: in October 2023, the average temperature was 15.25 degrees, which is 0.8 degrees above the average for the years 1991 to 2020 and 1.65 degrees higher than the pre-industrial period. The oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface, play a crucial role in temperature regulation and are closely linked to record high air temperatures. The Copernicus data is based on billions of measurements worldwide and shows that the Earth is on a dangerous course.