The Tories have also been accused of running a “government of destruction”
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Leading climate scientists have said that 2023 will go down in history as the hottest year on record, as the climate crisis continues to accelerate. Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service today said: “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.”
The news is a stark warning that governments are failing to get a grip on the climate emergency mere weeks before a crucial climate summit in Dubai later this month. World leaders will be meeting for the COP28 summit from November 30 to December 12 in pursuit of international agreements to reduce carbon emissions.
It also comes just one day after Rishi Sunak’s government used the King’s Speech to confirm plans for further licensing of oil and gas fields in the North Sea.
As a result, the Tory government has come under heavy criticism for its climate policies. Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer branded the government ‘totally reckless’ for continuing to push ahead with more fossil fuel extraction.
Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.
“The unprecedented temperatures for the time of year observed in September—following a record summer—have broken records by an extraordinary amount.”
Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Thursday that 2023 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded following a string of scorching months, including an unusually warm September that stunned scientists.
Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo toldThe Associated Press that September was “just mindblowing” and that he has “never seen anything like that in any month in our records,” echoing the sentiments of other experts.
The European climate agency said Thursday that last month was the warmest September on record globally and “the most anomalous warm month of any year” in its dataset going back to 1940.
“The month as a whole was around 1.75°C warmer than the September average for 1850-1900, the preindustrial reference period,” the agency noted. “The global temperature for January-September 2023 was 0.52°C higher than average, and 0.05°C higher than the equivalent period in the warmest calendar year (2016).”
Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ deputy director, said in a statement that “the unprecedented temperatures for the time of year observed in September—following a record summer—have broken records by an extraordinary amount.”
“This extreme month has pushed 2023 into the dubious honor of first place—on track to be the warmest year and around 1.4°C above preindustrial average temperatures,” Burgess added. “Two months out from COP28—the sense of urgency for ambitious climate action has never been more critical.”
(Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF)
The new Copernicus data came hours after the release of a United Nations report that called on nations worldwide to end fossil fuel exploration by 2030, warning that countries are not acting with sufficient urgency to rein in planet-heating pollution.
Simon Stiell, the U.N. climate chief, said the report “puts the cards on the table—except this is not a game.”
“We know that we as the global community are not on track towards achieving the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement and that there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future,” said Stiell.
In Brief: It’s not your imagination: Certain extreme events, like heat waves, are happening more often and becoming more intense. But what role are humans playing in Earth’s extreme weather and climate event makeover? Scientists are finding clear human fingerprints.
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There’s growing evidence that people and the planet are increasingly impacted by extreme events. According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, published in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, “more frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”
As the impacts of extreme events continue to mount, interest has grown in the scientific community to study whether specific extreme events can be partially attributed to human activities. With the help of climate models, scientists have conducted an impressive array of studies, looking for possible links between human activities and extreme events such as heat waves, rainfall and flooding events, droughts, storms, and wildfires.
A dry lake bed. Scientists are seeing an increase in the intensity of droughts. Credit: NOAA
Increasingly, they’re able to draw robust connections. There are reductions in the number of cold waves, increases in the number of heat waves on the ocean and on land, increases in the intensity of rainfall and drought, and increases in the intensity of wildfires. Despite the complications and uniqueness of individual events, scientists are finding significant human contributions to many of them.
An interactive map produced by CarbonBrief in 2020, shown below, provides visible evidence of these studies. On it, red dots represent different extreme events where scientists have found a substantial contribution from human activities – that is, human activities have made these events more frequent or more intense. For some of the blue dots, however (associated with rainfall events), scientists have yet to find a substantial human contribution.
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The continued increase in global mean temperatures in response to rising levels of greenhouse gases sets the expectation that we’ll see a corresponding increase in global heat extremes. Indeed, this is being borne out by daily temperature data across the globe. Studies of individual heat waves, such as the devastating event that took place in the Pacific Northwest this summer, suggest such events have become tens to hundreds of times more likely because of human-driven climate change.
A global examination of how often heat waves are occurring, as well as their cumulative intensity (how many days heat waves last above a certain temperature level), published last year by Australian scientists from the Climate Change Research Centre and the University of New South Wales Canberra, reveals a clear increase of more than two days per decade in the number of heat wave days since the 1950s.
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The intensity of droughts is increasing. It’s not so much that scientists are seeing less rainfall, though that’s certainly happening in some places. Rather, in places where drought conditions exist, soils are becoming drier due to other factors, such as increased soil evaporation and decreased snowpack, which is reducing the amount of river flow during summer and fall. In the American Southwest, scientists estimate human-caused climate change is making droughts 30 to 50 percent more intense. 1
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There have been hurricanes and intense storms throughout history, so what’s changed? Model studies confirm that, for instance, about 20 percent of Harvey’s rainfall was attributable to human-produced warming of the climate and waters in the Gulf of Mexico. 2, 3 More generally, climate simulations confirm that this increased intensity is a robust result.
It’s important to note that impacts from extreme events are mainly a question of thresholds – the amount of flooding needed to overtop a levee, or overwhelm storm drains – so every inch (of additional rain) counts. So, while total rainfall may increase only slightly, it’s the extreme precipitation events that disproportionately cause problems.
The Bottom Line
The combination of models and observations, informed by the unique view that space provides, imply that almost all the current multi-decadal trends we’re seeing in climate are the result of human activities. In addition, there’s increasing confidence that human-induced climate change is making extreme events statistically much more likely.
This doesn’t mean every extreme event has a substantial human contribution. But with extreme events such as heat waves, wildfires and intense precipitation, we’re seeing, in event after event, a very clear human fingerprint.
