After October's record-breaking temperature, experts from the European Union said on Wednesday, November 8, that this year is virtually certain to be the hottest in 125,000 years.
"We can say with near certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, and is currently 1.43C above the pre-industrial average," according to Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. "The sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into COP28 has never been higher."
COP28 refers to the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties or the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC).
Based on the data collected by the Copernicus satellite, global temperatures of this year's October were 1.7 degrees Celsius higher than the average October temperature estimated for 1850 to 1900.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, global average surface temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees Celsius due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of natural habitats, which release heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Researchers determined that October 2023's worldwide temperature anomaly was the second greatest among all months in their dataset, behind only September 2023.
Record Temperatures That Shocked Experts
A climate expert at Imperial College London, Friederike Otto, has predicted that this record-breaking heat wave would result in unprecedented suffering among people. He pointed out that thousands of people have died this year due to heatwaves and droughts, both of which were exacerbated by the abnormally high temperatures.
"That is why the Paris Agreement is a human rights treaty, and not keeping to the goals in it is violating human rights on a vast scale," Otto added, as reported by the Guardian.
Eight years ago, at a conference in Paris, global leaders pledged to do their best to prevent the earth from warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the turn of the century. In contrast, the present strategies are expected to increase the temperature by around 2.4 degrees Celsius.
University of Reading meteorology researcher Akshay Deoras said that October 2023's extreme heat was just another tragic illustration of how temperature records are being surpassed by an enormous margin. The effects of El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean and global warming caused by human activities are having devastating effects on Earth.
Scientists were taken aback by last month's record temperatures. They estimate the extraordinary temperatures to have been caused by a potent combination of greenhouse gas pollution, the return of the natural weather pattern El Niño, and a number of additional variables like a decline in sulfur pollution and a volcanic eruption in Tonga.
Copernicus noted the persistence of El Niño conditions, but with temperature anomalies that were less than those seen in 1997 and 2015.
