2023-07-04 19:48:29
For the time being, July 2 is the hottest day on earth that climate research has recorded since temperature measurements began. The threshold of 17 degrees had never been exceeded in the records before. Robert Rohde, chief scientist at the Californian climate organization Berkeley Earth, which evaluates the daily measurements of the American National Center for Environmental Predictions (NECP), commented on the record value registered by the NECP with the words: “Global warming is leading us into an unknown world.”
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the “Nature and Science” department.
In fact, there have been indications for weeks that the heating of the planet will get an extraordinary boost this year and especially next year. Summer in the northern hemisphere has only just begun. The same applies to the climate phenomenon El Niño, which built up in the first half of the year and, with huge amounts of warm water on the surface of the eastern and central Pacific, indicates a heat anomaly that will last well into next year – and is therefore likely to cause even more high temperatures and weather chaos worldwide. Climate change and El Niño are working hand in hand for the next several months when it comes to global warming.
The traces are already visible: The previous month, June 2023, pulverized all previous records for this month after May, which was already rich in temperature deviations: 0.16 degrees above the highest global mean value in June 2019. Over the entire period since the middle of the In the nineteenth century – since humans started blowing fossil fuels and long-lived greenhouse gases into the air – this June was 1.46 degrees Celsius warmer than a pre-industrial June, according to climate analyst Zeke Hausfather.
This also gradually increases the probability of a gloomy climate policy scenario: namely the probability that the global temperature increase will exceed the 1.5 degrees over a longer period of time, which has been wanted to avoid at all costs since the Paris climate summit eight years ago. Berkeley Earth recently put the chance that this year will be the warmest on record since measurements began at 54 percent, and other climate institutes have even increased the probability next year to 74 percent because of El Niño.
And: The 1.5-degree threshold should also fall at least for a while. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also recently released a report that said there is a 66 percent chance of reaching plus 1.5 degrees for at least a year sometime between 2023 and 2027. However, according to many experts, such as Michael Mann from Penn State University, that would still not be a violation of the Paris climate agreement. For this to happen, warming would need to exceed the critical threshold more consistently over a much longer period of time. The fact is: the signs are currently pointing to acceleration. At the beginning of June, the European Satellitenmonitoringprojekt EU-Copernicus after evaluating the most recent temperature data from different sources: Compared to the global temperature recorded in the years 1850 to 1900 and calculated from different sources, the plus 1.5 degrees was already exceeded at the beginning of March and June of this year – at least on a daily basis.
The latest data from the “Climate Reanalyzer” now shows that the average temperature rose again at the beginning of July, to more than plus 1.5 degrees (compared this time with the average from 1880 to 1920). 17 degrees on average worldwide – the value had not yet been scratched in the climate statistics. The reason for the rise in temperature is easy to understand in the satellite data from “NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System”, or CERES for short – which is also reflected in the enormous warming of the oceans in the recent past. The earth’s energy balance has shifted massively in favor of the heating of the atmosphere and oceans: to 1.81 watts per square meter of surface. This is also a new record value for the “Earth Energy Imbalance”, EEI for short.
Joachim Müller-Jung Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 28 Joachim Müller-Jung Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 36
This figure has now more than tripled since the beginning of this century. If you convert the amounts of energy that are available in one year for heating the entire surface of the earth because of the increased greenhouse effect, which mathematics professor Eliot Jacobson likes to do on Twitter, this roughly corresponds to the energy content that would be released in each every second more than fourteen Hiroshima bombs explode.
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