The Official Numbers Are In And 2023 Was The World's Hottest Year By An Insane Margin

  Shades of red on this map are areas that were warmer
than the long term average for Earth. Dark reds are 
near record warms. Blue is colder than the long
term average, but as you can see, there's not much.

 The receipts are pretty much all in for the world's climate in 2023, and to nobody's surprise, it was the hottest year on record. 

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information released their 2023 global climate report Friday, and the numbers are pretty shocking.

The world's overall temperature was 2.43 degrees above the pre-industrial average as measured between 1850 and 1900.  This exceeding the old 2016 hottest year record by 0.27 degrees. 

"After seeing the 2023 climate analysis, I have to pause and say that the findings are astounding.....Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA's 174-year climate record, it was the warmest by far," said NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. 

 Breaking the world hottest year record by barely a quarter degree might not seem like much. But exceeding a record hot year for the whole globe by that margin is insanely huge. 

The top 10 hottest years on record for Earth were each of the past ten years - 2014 to 2023.  Bit of a trend there, huh?

NOAA's data indicates the hottest places on Earth in 2023 - relative to average anyway - were the Arctic, Canada, the northern tier of the United States, much of the North Atlantic, central Asia and the eastern tropical Pacific.

If you were looking for places that were cool relative to average last year, good luck. The only places that came in sort of on the chilly side were eastern and western Antartica, some of the ocean areas west of Antarctica and southern Greenland, for a change.

Other agencies that take Earth's temperature were completely on board with NOAA's assessment. 

The first major set of global data came in on Tuesday (January 9) from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which is Europe's top climate agency.  Along with agreeing that 2023 was by far the hottest year on record, they also noted it was the first year on record that all 265 days of the year were at least 1 degree Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average. Almost half of 2023's days were 1.5 degrees Celsius on the warm side. 

WHY SO HOT?

NASA scientists said they were wowed by the fact that every month in 2023 starting in June broke the record for world's hottest month. Sure, El Nino influenced it, but the effects of El Nino on global temperatures are expected to peak in the late winter and early spring. 

El Nino is a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific ocean that tends to lead to higher global temperatures. 

Trend line in global temperatures compared to the
long term average. 2023 was by far the 
warmest of them all. Click on this image 
to make it bigger and easier to see.

Climatologists are scratching their heads. They knew 2023 would be warm, especially as El Nino developed. 

They're usually pretty good about predicting by how much an upcoming year will be different from normal. But 2023 was way warmer than anybody expected. Nobody is 100 percent sure why. 

It could be just a fluke. There's always been hotter than normal years, even before climate change became a thing. Maybe it was just destined to be a hot year then El Nino and climate change just made things insane.

Maybe it's new regulations that reduce aerosol pollution in the air. That could have let more sun through, baking the planet further. But many climate scientists doubt that had much of an effect.

In January, 2022,  the Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific blew up spectacularly, sending an unprecedented amount of water vapor high into the stratosphere. The water up there could be having a slight warming effect on the Earth. But the volcano also sent ash particles high up into the atmosphere. Those ash particles from volcanos typically cool the Earth a little. 

Not only was the Earth's air the hottest on record in 2023. So were the oceans.

OTHER HEAT WEIRDNESS

The rate of increase in ocean temperatures was slower than the previous two years. But that's not exactly a positive size. El Nino transfers heat from the oceans below the surface to the air. That's why the world generally experiences hotter years during an El Nino.

El Nino and climate change worked in concert to make 2023 so much warmer than any previous hot year. El Nino boosts the world's temperature.  So does climate change. It was a double whammy in 2023

A lot of record hot individual days hit different parts of the world in 2023, too. A total of 21 nations or territories had their all-time hottest temperatures on record.

Three nations or territories did manage to have their coldest day on record. That's an example of how climate change can be described as global weirding. For the most part, we're warming up, but we're also seeing larger extremes. 

Which means record cold waves are now less likely than they used to be, but they're also not impossible. 

The best way to blunt further effects from climate change is to sharply reduce the amount of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane from reaching the atmosphere. 

We didn't exactly do a great job with that, says Yale Climate Connections:

"The two main human-emitted heat trapping gases - carbon dioxide and methane - both reached all time highs in 2023, with the methane growth rate hitting the highest level on record. Although CO2 concentrations have hit a new high each year for decades the increase in methane has been more irregular: There was an unexpected leveling off in the 2000s, followed bay a sharp increase in the 2010s and 2020s"

LOOKING AHEAD

Already, the predictions are grim for 2024. NCEI says there's a one in three chance that this year will break the hottest year mark set in 2023. They give 2024 a 99 percent chance of scoring in the top five hottest. 

There will be a few years in the immediate future that end up being slightly cooler than 2023, but not many of them. 

The record global heat of 2023 reminds me of 1998. when a strong El Nino and earlier stages of climate change rocketed that year to become by a large margin the hottest year on record at the time. Now, 1998 is not even in the top 10 hot list anymore. 

Probably 20 years down the road, 2023 will seem like a quaintly chilly year for Planet Earth. The extreme weather effects we'll see at that point will make the current disasters seem like inconvenient weekend downpours. 

You thought the weather extremes over past year in Vermont and much of the rest of the world were way too much. 

You ain't see nothin' yet.