October breaks heat record for the month, says observatory – 11/08/2023 – Environment

It is “virtually certain” that 2023 will be the hottest year in 125,000 years, European Union scientists said on Wednesday (8), after global data showed that last month was the hottest October on record.

The highest temperature mark for the month on the planet, 2019, was easily surpassed, said the Climate Change Service (C3S) at Copernicus, a European climate observatory.

“The record was broken by 0.4°C, which is a huge margin,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, describing October’s temperature anomaly as “very extreme”. In 2023, the average for the period was 15.38°C on the planet’s surface.

The heat is the result of continued emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity, combined with the occurrence of El Niño, which warms surface waters in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

Globally, the average air temperature in October was 1.7°C warmer than the average for the month in the pre-industrial period (1850-1900).

So far, the year 2023 has had another four consecutive months that were the hottest for the period — and a July that was marked as the hottest month ever recorded in history. The previous record was from 2016 — another El Niño year.

Since January, the planet’s average temperature has been the hottest ever recorded for the first ten months of the year, remaining 1.43°C above the average for the period 1850-1900, according to Copernicus.

The Copernicus dataset dates back to 1940. “When we combine our data with the IPCC [Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas]so we can say that this is the hottest year in the last 125 thousand years,” said Burgess.

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

There has only been one other time before October that a month surpassed the temperature record by such a large margin, in September 2023.

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

For Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), “most El Niño years are now record-breaking, because the extra global heat from El Niño adds to the steady increase in human-caused warming.”

Climate change is fueling increasingly destructive extremes. This year, that has included floods that killed thousands of people in Libya, severe heat waves in South America and the worst wildfire season on record in Canada.

“We must not allow the devastating floods, bushfires, storms and heatwaves seen this year to become the new normal,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds (England).

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

Although countries have ambitious targets to gradually reduce emissions, this has not yet happened. Global CO emissions_two reached a record in 2022.

Data from five consecutive months of record heat reinforces scientists’ warnings ahead of COP28, the UN conference on climate change that will take place in Dubai from November 30th to December 12th.

“The feeling that there is an urgent need to take ambitious climate action ahead of COP28 has never been stronger,” Burgess added in a statement.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, global warming should ideally be limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a margin to avoid greater disasters caused by climate change. COP28 is expected to present the first official assessment since the goal was adopted.

The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) predicted that the limit should be exceeded for the first time within a 12-month period in the next five years. However, it will be necessary to record an increase of 1.5°C in the average over several years to consider that the barrier has been overcome from a climatic point of view.

The IPCC predicts that there is a 50% chance of this happening between 2030 and 2035, taking into account the pace of greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, scientists consider warming to be in the range of 1.2°C compared to the pre-industrial era.