After the wait, the confirmation: 2023, marked by a procession of unprecedented climatic disasters, is indeed the hottest year in history, flirting for the first time over an entire year with the limit of 1.5°C of global warming set by the Paris agreement.
With an average temperature of 14.98°C, the past year was 1.48°C warmer than the climate of the pre-industrial era (1850-1900), the European Copernicus Observatory announced on Tuesday in its annual report . The new record exceeds by a large margin (0.17°C) the previous one, although recent, from 2016.
Behind this measure lies a long list of climate disasters, fueled by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions: massive fires in Canada, extreme droughts in the Horn of Africa or the Middle East, heatwaves. unprecedented summer temperatures in Europe, the United States and China, record winter heat in Australia or South America, devastating precipitation, stronger hurricanes, etc.
An assessment presented one month after the historic COP28 agreement
If annual data from Copernicus goes back to 1850, the temperatures recorded in 2023 “probably exceed those of all periods for at least 100,000 years”, known thanks to tree rings or ice cores, commented Samantha Burgess, deputy head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
The annual report is published one month after the United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai. The COP28, responsible for establishing a corrective to save the 1.5°C objective of the Paris agreement, produced a historic agreement paving the way for the gradual abandonment of fossil fuels, the main causes of global warming. .
“It is probable” that the bar of 1.5°C of warming over 12 rolling months will be measured “in January or February 2024”, despite the cold which is crossing Europe at the moment, predicts Copernicus. This anomaly must, however, be noted on average over “at least 20 years” to consider that the global climate has reached this limit, recalls the observatory.