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This past year was the hottest on record, according to analysis from a European climate agency.
2023′s global average temperature of 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit) beat the previous record-holder, 2016, by 0.17 degrees Celsius, the agency Copernicus announced Tuesday.
Last year’s temperatures were also 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial times. That figure is narrowly below the 1.5 C threshold agreed upon during 2015 Paris climate talks to avoid the most severe effects of global warming.
“2023 was an exceptional year with climate records tumbling like dominoes,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, in a statement.
Groups including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Berkeley Earth are expected to release their 2023 temperature calculations this week.
Temperatures started becoming particularly notable halfway through 2023. From June through the end of the year, according to Copernicus, each month was warmer than the corresponding month in any previous year.
Texans don’t need numbers to contextualize the effects of 2023′s historically hot summer — they have experience. Summer 2023 was Texas’ second-hottest on record, and Dallas-Fort Worth’s third-hottest. The sweltering temperatures challenged the state’s power grid and more than 20 people in Dallas and Tarrant counties died from heat-related illnesses.
September 2023 was also the hottest ever recorded for Texas.
The abundance of asphalt and concrete parking lots in Texas that act like “heat sponges,” soaking up heat during the day and contributing to the urban heat island effect, may make heat waves feel worse.
2023′s temperatures may relate to two factors, according to Arne Winguth, chair of the University of Texas at Arlington’s department of earth and environmental sciences. One is natural variations in climate — 2023, for example, featured an El Niño, a climate phenomenon that develops every few years and warms ocean temperatures above average. The second is human-caused climate change.
It’s difficult for scientists to say whether a single year’s temperatures are a result of climate change. Instead, they examine patterns of change in the globe’s temperatures over time. Many viewed the summer’s record-breaking global temperatures not as an anomaly, but as a step toward an even hotter future.
January 2024 may be so warm that average global temperatures over a 12-month period may surpass the Paris climate accords’ 1.5-degree limit for the first time, Copernicus predicts. The planet would need to warm over this threshold for two to three decades to technically surpass the limit set by the accords.
The consequences of surpassing these limits over time, Winguth said, stretch into countless aspects of everyday life. Heat waves may become more frequent and intense, crop yields may decrease and wildfire risk could increase.
“I think one needs to find actions to reduce the source of these long-term trends,” he said, “and this needs to be done on a global initiative.”
Curbing greenhouse gas emissions, which are mainly released by burning fossil fuels, can help fight rising temperatures.
In 2021, President Joe Biden announced a goal to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas pollution by 50% to 52% from 2005 levels by 2030. Experts estimate that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax credits as motivation to invest in clean energy and buy electric vehicles and solar panels, could help decrease emissions by 40% by 2030 if fully implemented.
Energy-related greenhouse gas emissions have remained relatively level in Texas over the past two decades. In 2021, Texas produced 663.5 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the most of any state and more than double that of second-place California, according to a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.