Many Records Broken
The Art
The Science
Climate-related all-time records
“In 2023, we witnessed an extraordinary series of climate-related records being broken around the world. The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected …. This year, exceptional heat waves have swept across the world, leading to record high temperatures. The oceans have been historically warm, with global and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures both breaking records and unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica…. In addition, June through August of this year was the warmest period ever recorded, and in early July, we witnessed Earth's highest global daily average surface temperature ever measured, possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years …. It is a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.
We are venturing into uncharted climate territory. Global daily mean temperatures never exceeded 1.5-degree Celsius (°C) above preindustrial levels prior to 2000 and have only occasionally exceeded that number since then. However, 2023 has already seen 38 days with global average temperatures above 1.5°C by 12 September—more than any other year—and the total may continue to rise. Even more striking are the enormous margins by which 2023 conditions are exceeding past extremes (figure 1). Similarly, on 7 July 2023, Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest daily relative extent since the advent of satellite data, at 2.67 million square kilometers below the 1991–2023 average (figure 1a). Other variables far outside their historical ranges include the area burned by wildfires in Canada (figure 1f), which may indicate a tipping point into a new fire regime.
Anthropogenic global heating is a key driver of many of these recent extremes. However, the specific driving processes involved can be quite complex. … In any case, as Earth's climate system transitions away from conditions associated with human thriving, such anomalies may become more frequent and could have increasingly catastrophic impacts ….”
William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W Gregg, Johan Rockström, Thomas M Newsome, Beverly E Law, Luiz Marques, Timothy M Lenton, Chi Xu, Saleemul Huq, Leon Simons, Sir David Anthony King, The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory, BioScience, Volume 73, Issue 12, December 2023, Pages 841–850, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad080,
Figure 1
