Summer (June-July-August) saw the highest average global temperatures ever measured, the European observatory Copernicus announced on Wednesday, for which 2023 will probably be the hottest year in history. “Climate collapse has begun,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
“Our climate is imploding faster than we can handle it, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet,” he added, recalling how “scientists have long warned of the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels. Heat waves, droughts, floods or fires hit Asia, Europe and North America during this period, in dramatic and often unprecedented proportions, with their cost in human lives and in damage to economies and the environment. .
The southern hemisphere, where many heat records were broken in the middle of the austral winter, was not spared. “The June-July-August 2023 season”, which corresponds to summer in the Northern Hemisphere, where the vast majority of the world’s population lives, “was by far the hottest on record in the world, with a temperature global average of 16.77°C,” Copernicus announced.
This is 0.66°C above averages for the 1991-2020 period, which was already marked by rising average global temperatures due to human-induced global warming. And well above – around 2 tenths – the previous record of 2019. July had been the hottest month ever measured, August 2023 is now the 2nd, specifies Copernicus. And over the first eight months of the year, the average global temperature is “only 0.01°C behind 2016, the warmest year on record.”
But this record is hanging by a thread, given the seasonal forecasts and the return to power in the Pacific of the El Niño climatic phenomenon, synonymous with additional warming. And “given the excess heat on the surface of the oceans, it is likely that 2023 will be the hottest year […] that humanity has known”, told AFP Samantha Burgess, deputy chief of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
The Copernicus database dates back to 1940, but can be compared to the climates of past millennia, established using tree rings or ice cores and synthesized in the latest report from the UN’s climate expert group ( IPCC). Based on this, “the three months we have just experienced are the hottest in about 120,000 years, that is to say since the beginning of human history,” says Burgess.
Despite three successive years of La Niña, the opposite phenomenon of El Niño which partly masked the warming, the years 2015-2022 have already been the warmest ever measured. The overheating of the world’s seas, which continue to absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by human activity since the industrial era, plays a major role in the phenomenon.
