2023 is the hottest year in history

Paris (agencies)

Yesterday, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, announced that the Earth is witnessing a “climate collapse”, after data showed that the past three months were the hottest since data recording began in 1940.
The European Copernicus Observatory reported that the summer season from June to August witnessed the highest average global temperatures ever measured, with 2023 likely to be the hottest year in history. “Our climate is collapsing faster than we can handle it, while extreme weather events are hitting every corner of the planet,” Guterres added, recalling how “scientists have long warned of the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels.” Heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires have hit Asia, Europe and North America. During this period, massive and often unprecedented scales have occurred, with consequent loss of life and damage to economies and the environment.
The southern hemisphere was not spared from these violent phenomena, where many temperature records were broken in the middle of the southern winter.
The Copernicus Observatory said: “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 “the hottest ever in the world, with an average global temperature of 16.77 degrees Celsius.” . This is 0.66°C more than the average for the period 1991-2020, which saw average global temperatures rise due to human-caused climate warming, and is about 0.2°C higher than the previous record level recorded in 2019.
July 2023 was the hottest month ever, and August 2023 is now the second, according to Copernicus. Over the first eight months of the year, the global average temperature was “only 0.01°C lower than in 2016, the hottest year on record”. However, this record is not insurmountable, given the seasonal forecasts and the return of the El Niño weather phenomenon in the Pacific region, which is synonymous with more global warming.
“Given the extra heat on the surface of the oceans, it is likely that 2023 will be the hottest year known to humanity,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy head of the climate change division at the Copernicus Observatory. On this basis, Burgess said: “The three months we have just witnessed are the hottest in about 120,000 years, that is, since the beginning of human history.” The warming of the world’s seas, which still absorb 90% of the excess heat generated by human activity since the industrial age, plays a major role in this phenomenon.