LONDON, July 23 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A series of climate records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice have alarmed some scientists who say their speed and timing is “unprecedented”.
According to the UN, Dangerous heatwaves sweeping Europe could break further records.
The international media has reported that it is hard to immediately link these events to climate change because weather – and the Earth’s oceans – are so complex.
Studies are under way, but scientists already fear some worst-case scenarios are unfolding.
“I’m not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory,” Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at London School of Economics, says.
“The Earth is in uncharted territory” now due to global warming from burning fossil fuels, as well as heat from the first El Nio – a warming natural weather system – since 2018, says Imperial College London climate science lecturer Dr Paulo Ceppi.
The world experienced its hottest day ever recorded in July, breaking the global average temperature record set in 2016.
Multiple line chart showing daily average global air temperature, with a line for each year between 1940 and 2023. The 2023 line reaches 17.06C on 6 July, breaking the previous record from 2016.
Average global temperature topped 17C for the first time, reaching 17.08C on 6 July, according to EU climate monitoring service Copernicus.
Ongoing emissions from burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and gas are behind the planet’s warming trend.
This is exactly what was forecast to happen in a world warmed by more greenhouse gases, says climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London.
“Humans are 100% behind the upward trend,” she says.
“If I’m surprised by anything, it’s that we’re seeing the records broken in June, so earlier in the year. El Nio normally doesn’t really have a global impact until five or six months into the phase,” Dr Smith says.
El Nio is the world’s most powerful naturally occurring climate fluctuation. It brings warmer water to the surface in the tropical Pacific, pushing warmer air into the atmosphere. It normally increases global air temperatures.
The average global temperature in June this year was 1.47C above the typical June in the pre-industrial period. Humans started pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when the Industrial Revolution started around 1800.
Bar chart showing the global average June temperature for each year between 1850 and 2023, compared with pre-industrial average for June (1850-1900). Since 1934, each year has been warmer than the pre-industrial average, with 2023 breaking last year’s record at +1.47C.
Asked if summer 2023 is what he would have forecasted a decade ago, Dr Smith says that climate models are good at predicting long-term trends but less good at forecasting the next 10 years.
“Models from the 1990s pretty much put us where we are today. But to have an idea about what the next 10 years would look like exactly would be very difficult,” he says.
The average global ocean temperature has smashed records for May, June and July. It is approaching the highest sea surface temperature ever recorded, which was in 2016.
But it is extreme heat in the North Atlantic ocean that is particularly alarming scientists.
An animated map showing sea surface temperature anomaly between 1 April and 16 July 2023 over the Atlantic Ocean and part of the Pacific Ocean. It shows the build up of El Nio off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, and the marine heatwave in the North Atlantic Ocean.
“We’ve never ever had a marine heatwave in this part of Atlantic. I had not expected this,” says Daniela Schmidt, Prof of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
In June temperatures off the west coast of Ireland were between 4C and 5C above average, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration classified as a category 5 heatwave, or “beyond extreme”.
Directly attributing this heatwave to climate change is complex, but that work is ongoing, Prof Schmidt says.
What is clear is that the world has warmed and the oceans have absorbed most of that heat from the atmosphere, she explains.
“Our models have natural variability in them, and there are still things appearing that we had not envisaged, or at least not yet,” she adds.
The area covered by sea-ice in the Antarctic is at record lows for July. There is an area around 10 times the size of the UK missing, compared with the 1981-2010 average.
Multiple line chart showing daily Antarctic sea-ice extent, with a line for each year between 1979 and 2023. The 2023 line is well below the average extent for both June and July.
A warming world could reduce levels of Antarctic sea-ice, but the current dramatic reduction could also be due to local weather conditions or ocean currents, explains Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey.
She emphasises it is not just a record being broken – it is being smashed by a long way.
Scientists believed that global warming would affect Antarctic sea-ice at some point, but until 2015 it bucked the global trend for other oceans, Dr Holmes says.
“You can say that we’ve fallen off a cliff, but we don’t know what’s at the bottom of the cliff here,” she says. — NNN-AGENCIES
