The year 2023 produced the warmest November on record globally, and likely the warmest year the Earth has seen in 10,000 years or more, according to climate experts.
The average global surface air temperature this November was 57.6 degrees Fahrenheit — or .57 degrees above the previous warmest November in 2020, and 1.53 degrees F above the 1991-2020 average for November, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Though that change may seem nominal, climate scientists compared this year to pre-industrial temperatures from 1850-1900, before human-induced climate change was a factor. 2023’s global November temperatures were about 3.15 degrees F warmer than pre-industrial Novembers. So far, 2023 is 2.63 degrees warmer than pre-industrial averages.
The U.N. weather agency, the World Meteorological Organization, echoed the findings last month, saying that 2023 is all but certain to be the hottest year on record, and warning of worrying trends that suggest increasing floods, wildfires, glacier melt, and heat waves in the future.
The warmest calendar year ever recorded prior to this was 2016.
2023 has it beat by .23 degrees at this point, making this the warmest year ever recorded.
Deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Samantha Burgess, said that “the extraordinary global November temperatures, including two days warmer than 2ºC above preindustrial, mean that 2023 is the warmest year in recorded history.”
The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said the onset earlier this year of El Niño, the weather phenomenon marked by heating in the Pacific Ocean, could tip the average temperature next year over the 2.7 degrees target cap set in Paris.
University of Miami climate and sea-level-rise researcher Brian McNoldy said that El Niño indicators show no signs of slowing down. “I can’t see it not hitting 2ºC warmer than average. That’s a very strong El Niño — that rarely happens.”
El Niños tend to raise temperatures globally. For South Florida, that usually means wetter weather and more cloud cover. The forces of El Niño cause the subtropical jet stream, which travels west to east over the Pacific, to shift to the south, picking up moisture over the Gulf of Mexico and steering storms across the southern U.S. to South Florida.
C3S/ECMWF
Globally averaged surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1991–2020 for each November from 1940 to 2023. Data: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF
But the warming trend goes well beyond the 2023 El Niño. 2015 to 2023 has been the hottest nine-year stretch on record, the WMO said. Its findings for this year run through October, but it said the last two months are not likely to be enough to keep 2023 from being a record-hot year.
McNoldy said that 2023 is likely the warmest year in the past 10,000 years, probably longer, given the last Ice Age was tapering off at the time.
Though there are obviously no written records of that time period, “we have ice cores; those are basically time capsules that go back a very long time. It isn’t a precise number going back that far, but a general ballpark for sure.”
“It has been warmer in the past,” said McNoldy, speaking about millions of years ago, but “the rate of change is important. The climate is changing quicker now than it has in known history.”
The rate of change in the past has been slow enough to give species and ecosystems time to adapt “or even evolve,” McNoldy said. “This (rate of change) is not on the scale where things can evolve.
“The sea level around the world has been 400 feet higher than it is now, when all the ice caps were gone, and that’s in the Earth’s future at some point when the ice caps are gone again, but sea levels are rising rapidly now compared to how quickly they’ve risen historically.”
An exception to that, he said, was an event called the “meltwater pulse 1A,” which happened 14,500 years ago.
Massive ice shelves cleaved off into the oceans and sea levels rose 59 feet in 500 years, or .12 inches per year, according to researchers at Durham University in England. NASA says that’s about the rate of sea level rise the Earth is experiencing right now.
Information from The Associated Press was used to supplement to this news article.
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.