2023 confirmed as world's hottest year on record
The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event, BBC reports.
Last year was about 1.48C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU's climate service says.
Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, BBC analysis shows.
Sea surface temperatures have also smashed previous highs.
The Met Office reported last week that the UK experienced its second warmest year on record in 2023.
These global records are bringing the world closer to breaching key international climate targets. It's well-known that the world is much warmer now than 100 years ago, as humans keep releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But 12 months ago, no major science body actually predicted 2023 being the hottest year on record, because of the complicated way in which the Earth's climate behaves.
During the first few months of the year, only a small number of days broke air temperature records.
But the world then went on a remarkable, almost unbroken streak of daily records in the second half of 2023.
The year 2024 could be warmer than 2023 - as some of the record ocean surface heat escapes into the atmosphere - although the "weird" behaviour of the current El Niño means it's hard to be sure, Dr Hausfather says.
It raises the possibility that 2024 may even surpass the key 1.5C warming threshold across the entire calendar year for the first time, according to the UK Met Office.
Nearly 200 countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to try to limit warming to this level, to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
It refers to long-term averages over 20 or 30 years, so a year-long breach in 2024 wouldn't mean the Paris agreement had been broken.
But it highlights the concerning direction of travel, with each hot year bringing the world closer to passing 1.5C over the longer term.
