This year is “almost certain” to be the warmest in 125,000 years

BRUSSELS:

This year is “almost certain” to be the warmest in 125,000 years, European Union scientists said on Wednesday, after data showed last month was the world’s warmest October on record.

Last month broke the previous October temperature record from 2019 by a huge margin, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

“The record was broken by 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is a huge margin,” said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess, who described October’s temperature anomaly as “very extreme”.

The heat is a result of continued greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, combined with the emergence this year of the El Nino weather pattern, which warms surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

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Globally, the average surface air temperature in October was 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 1850-1900, which Copernicus defines as the pre-industrial period.

The record-breaking October means 2023 is now “almost certain” to be the warmest year on record, C3S said in a statement. The previous record was in 2016 – another El Niño year.

The Copernicus data set goes back to 1940. “When we combine our data with the IPCC, then we can say that this is the warmest year in the last 125,000 years,” Burgess said.

Long-term data from the UN’s climate science panel IPCC includes readings from sources such as ice cores, tree rings and coral deposits.

The only other time before October that a month beat the temperature record by such a wide margin was September 2023.

“September really, really surprised us. So after last month, it’s hard to tell if we’re in a new climate state. But now the records keep falling and I’m less surprised than a month ago,” he said. Burgess.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said: “The most El Niño years are now on record because El Niño’s extra global heat adds to the steady rise in human-caused warming.”

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Climate change is fueling increasingly destructive extremes. This year, that included floods that killed thousands in Libya, severe heatwaves in South America and Canada’s worst fire season on record.

“We must not let the catastrophic floods, fires, storms and heatwaves seen this year become the new normal,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds.

“By rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade, we can halve the rate of warming,” he added.

Despite the fact that countries are setting increasingly ambitious targets to gradually reduce emissions, so far this has not happened. Global CO2 emissions hit a record high in 2022.