Is climate change accelerating and is it worse than we expected? July 2023 was the hottest month on record

 Is climate change accelerating and is it worse than we expected?

 16 August 2023, By Michael Le Page

With temperature records tumbling, it is only natural to worry about cascading tipping points, but the reality is far more nuanced

 

 

Unprecedented bouts of extreme weather and related events around the world raise the question of whether climate scientists have underestimated how fast the world is warming and how severe the consequences will be. Here are the key facts you need to know.

 

Is the world warming faster than we expected?

What made July 2023 the hottest month ever recorded?

Extreme weather and temperatures made July 2023 a shocking month, with human-driven global warming, the El Niño climate pattern and perhaps even a 2022 volcanic eruption contributing to the broken records

 

Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF

July 2023 was the hottest month on record, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts confirmed on 8 August. More broadly, this year’s overall global average temperature is shaping up to be the hottest ever measured.

 

The main reason for these extremes is the long-term effect of humans releasing ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, plus the shift to a warm El Niño pattern in the Pacific Ocean, says Michael McPhaden at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 

He says El Niño’s effect is especially striking after several cooler years in the Pacific “masked” a steady rise in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide – an increase of about 4 per cent since the last big El Niño in 2016.

 

The heat was also boosted by a wavy jet stream pattern (in yellow, above) that formed simultaneous “heat domes” of trapped hot air in North America, Europe and China. Whether climate change makes such heat domes themselves more likely is an active area of research.