After it was confirmed that this year’s fall was the warmest globally since measurements have been recorded, climatologists…
…are fully convinced – even before the year is over – that 2023 will be the warmest in history, or at least since such data have been recorded. Several factors influenced it, but the most important is the human factor.
CLIMATE CHANGES, Experts are sure: 2023 will be the hottest year on record on Earth
This results from data published on December 6th Copernicus Climate Change Service – C3S, otherwise part of the space program of the European Union.
They say that this year’s climatological autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, the period from the beginning of September to the end of November, is the warmest since 1940, when such statistics were kept, with temperatures 0.32 degrees higher than ever before.
Remember, it has already been confirmed that this year we had the hottest summer on record, in large part due to a record heat wave that included a series of three hottest days. During the year, monthly records were broken in six months, and the level of sea ice in Antarctica fell to the lowest values since measurements began.
So far this year, global average temperatures have been 1.46 degrees higher than pre-industrial temperatures and 0.16 degrees higher than 2016, which was the record year so far. All of this prompted C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess to announce in a press release that all records will fall this year.
Scientists say that the unusually warm autumn is partly caused by El Niño, a climate phenomenon in which warmer seas around the equator cause global temperatures to rise. It officially started in June. El Niño will continue into next year, which would mean that 2024 is likely to be as warm as the outgoing year. In the last three years, this has somehow been canceled out by the opposite phenomenon called La Niña. But as the ‘girl’ is absent, the temperatures on the surface of the sea are higher than ever.
Some believe that everything may have been influenced by the eruption of the underwater volcano in Tonga back in January 2022, because it released record amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, and trapped more heat. But that theory is less likely.
The main cause of rising temperatures is global warming caused by greenhouse gases that have ‘trapped’ energy in the atmosphere equivalent to 25 billion atomic bombs. This excess energy has not only raised temperatures but is also responsible for the greater unpredictability and damage of extreme events such as El Niño.
And that problem is getting worse. At the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) held in Abu Dhabi, scientists announced that carbon emissions have reached new record levels this year. As long as this happens, we cannot expect the extremism to calm down.
The effects of global warming are becoming more and more obvious. In the USA, the sinking of some large cities has been recorded, and more than half of the world’s largest lakes and reservoirs have shrunk. Some of the more dramatic announcements are the collapse of the Gulf Stream as early as 2025 and the rise in sea levels that could flood the US coast by 2050.