Its now official: 2023 was the warmest year on record in the JRA-55 dataset, at 1.43C above preindustrial levels. It beat the prior record set in 2016 by 0.14C, and continues a rapid warming trend thats seen global temperatures rise around 1C since 1970.
This year really stands out when we look at daily temperature anomalies in the JRA-55 dataset as much warmer than any prior year, particularly during the latter half of the year.
It equally stands out when we look at absolute global temperatures over time:
Here are monthly temperature anomalies for the year, showing how 2023 was far warmer than any prior year for each month of the year from June onward, with a particularly large record (0.5C!) set in September:
Finally, we can look at absolute global temperatures for 2023 compared to prior years in the JRA-55 dataset:
As we look forward to 2024, we would expect global temperatures to remain at record levels as El Nino conditions peak in the coming months. The year as a whole is likely to be similar to the record warmth we saw in 2023.
Ties other fields of study to the problems we have with addressing climate change:
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-evolution-humans-climate.html
We have engineers and technologists looking at the issue, and for them every problem has an easy solution – just change this for that. And we have climate scientists looking at the problem, but their specialty prevents them from saying anything more than what they can say about some specific physical aspect of climate change. But we don’t have enough people looking at WHY we humans drag our collective feet on addressing the elephant in the room. And yes, that’s almost certainly very bad news about us as a species, that there is something wrong with ourselves that will be incredibly difficult to address, but we will get nowhere fast without first understanding that we are the problem. We have to understand us to have a hope at changing our behavior.
Our politics are dominated by “America First” and other ethnocentric obsessions that are the hardwired code of our evolution. That’s a real problem.