For the last couple of years, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, has taken to X, formerly Twitter, to update a boilerplate response to the latest global temperature assessment.
His statement this year goes like this: “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest in the record. This, in turn, means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
It isn’t something he actually sends out to reporters looking for his scientific take on the latest temperature data, although the statement often ends up in news coverage — no doubt because it accurately and effectively communicates the magnitude of the global climate threat.
“I make this joke every year, the first time after I got my (probably) 100th request for a comment on a monthly or annual record temperature, about 2 years ago,” he said in an email Friday. “I thought to myself, ‘What else is there to say?’ and then my next thought is that, ‘This will never end until I’m dead.’ And so the tweet came to be.”
This week, three independent assessments confirmed last year was the hottest year in recorded history.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found global temperatures over land and sea in 2023 were approximately 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1.18 degrees Celsius) above the late 19th-century average. That’s a stunning 0.15 degrees Celsius above the previous record in 2016. NASA’s analysis came to nearly identical results.
“The findings are astounding,” Sarah Kapnick, chief scientist at NOAA, said during a press briefing Friday. “2023 was an extraordinarily warm year that produced many costly climate-driven weather events here in the United States and globally.”
Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt added, “We’re looking at this, and we’re frankly astonished. One of the things that we’ve historically liked to do in these briefings is give a little bit of a story about why any one year is different from any other year. There are a lot of candidates for it this year, but none of them really work.”
The two U.S. reports follow one on Tuesday from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which similarly concluded that 2023 was the hottest year since record keeping began in 1850. Europe experienced its second-hottest year, behind 2020, and its second-warmest winter.
“2023 was an exceptional year with climate records tumbling like dominoes,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “Not only is 2023 the warmest year on record, it is also the first year with all days over 1°C warmer than the pre-industrial period. Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.”
The reports further confirm that the goal of the landmark Paris climate accord — to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — is quickly slipping out of reach as the world struggles to rein in planet-warming greenhouse gasses.
The Copernicus assessment found that the global daily temperature topped the 1.5-degree threshold more than 50% of days last year and forecast that the 12-month period ending in January or February 2024 is “likely” to exceed 1.5 degrees.
NOAA found that 2024 has a one-in-three chance of being warmer than 2023.
The latest temperature assessments come on the heels of the United Nations COP28 climate summit in the oil-rich Dubai, where world leaders failed to strike a deal that specifically called for “phasing out” planet-warming fossil fuels. Instead, more than 200 countries adopted language calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”
2023 was marked by extreme heat waves across the U.S. Southwest and Europe, record-shattering wildfires in Canada and devastating flooding in East Africa and China.
Last year alone, the U.S. experienced a record-shattering 28 weather and climate disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damages each, NOAA announced earlier this week. Those events cost a combined $92.9 billion, including Hurricane Idalia in August, the deadly wildfires on Maui, Hawaii and numerous severe weather and flood events.
The 2023 tally tops the previous record of $22 billion events in 2020.