Filenews 18 February 2023
By Mark Gongloff
Whether it's winter or summer, it's been hard to avoid the terribly hot weather around the world this year. It may seem like an unfortunate circumstantial phenomenon, but it is actually a reflection of temperatures that are inevitably driven higher by a changing climate.
Last January was the seventh warmest in the world on record since 1850, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was also the 47th consecutive January and the 527th consecutive month above the average temperatures of the 20th century.
Last January was the 47th with an average temperature above that of the 20th century
In the southern hemisphere, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are suffering another brutally hot summer after breaking every heat record last year. High temperatures, drought and La Niña winds have sparked the frantic fires in Chile, which have killed at least 26 people and destroyed hundreds of homes. Argentina is experiencing its eighth heat wave of the summer, according to the country's National Weather Service. And Uruguay's hydroelectric dams are at risk of running out of enough water to be able to function.
New Year's Day and Antarctica
In the northern hemisphere, the New Year in Europe was the warmest in history, thanks to a warm wave that one climatologist called "the most extreme event in European history." And the U.S. has just experienced its sixth warmest January since at least 1895, with seven northeastern states hitting record high temperatures for the season.
At the poles, the extent of Arctic sea ice was the third lowest on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Worse, Antarctica's sea ice cover dropped to an all-time low, due to the astonishing warming in the Antarctic Ocean. "Even as someone who has been watching these changing systems for a few decades, I was surprised by what I saw, by the degree of warming I noticed" in Antarctica, University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat told Inside Climate News.
Even before the current heat wave, Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, also known as the "Crisis Glacier," was melting at the fastest rate in 5,000 years. The glacier is approaching an inflection point which could lead to the collapse of its own and the surrounding ice caps, causing a catastrophic rise in sea level.
Some places around the world have had a colder than usual January - Siberia, Australia and the Middle East, just to name a few. Even so, however, global temperatures are never uniform and climate change can cause extreme cold as well as heat. Temperatures can oscillate significantly in any region from year to year and from day to day.
However, the global trend is clearly rising in terms of temperature:
From anomaly to normality: global temperature trend is clearly rising
Transition
Climate change caused by human activity has already warmed the planet by about 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial trend.
The Earth was experiencing heat waves long before humans started burning fossil fuels, yet climate change makes such events much more likely.
Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the long run to avoid the worst impacts of climate change will require halving global carbon emissions by 2030.
This in turn will require much more aggressive commitments to the transition away from fossil fuels than the world has managed to date.
Otherwise, we can expect new extreme events that will make the unusual weather of January this year seem like a mere normality.
Source: BloombergOpinion
