Data from the EU's Copernicus climate change office indicates September 2023 was the hottest September on global record by such a wide margin that scientists are wondering whether we've crossed the line of no return.
The September milestone, reported in new data released late Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, added to an alarming stretch of record-breaking global temperatures. During June, July and August, the planet had its hottest summer on record “by a large margin.”
September's temperatures have climate scientists even more stunned.
“This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for the financial services company Stripe, wrote Tuesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said it’s worrying to see so many new records set, but it’s even more alarming to see by what margin they are being toppled. Average surface air temperatures last month were almost a degree Fahrenheit hotter than September 2020, which had been the warmest September on record.
“Normally when you’re beating a record, it’s by hundredths of a degree,” she said, “so this is really a huge amount."
September was also the most anomalously warm month in recorded history, meaning its deviation from the average was higher than any month so far, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
That warmth has continued into October. Temperatures around the world have remained elevated with a resurgence of summerlike conditions gripping residents of the Upper Midwest and the Northeast this week, despite being almost two full weeks into fall.
Record-smashing temperatures — above 90 F in some places — added to unseasonable warmth across a huge swath of the country, with cities from the Great Lakes to the Northeast experiencing high temperatures 10 to 30 degrees above average.
But the United States was hardly alone with its wild temperature swings: An October heat wave is baking Western Europe, with temperatures soaring well above 90 F in parts of France and Spain. And in the Southern Hemisphere, unseasonably warm temperatures have been recorded across South America and Australia, all coming on the heels of multiple bouts of extreme heat in previous months, during what should have been the winter season in that part of the world.
Conservatives will tell you that all this international climate data is really a conspiracy to use X as a fascism justification to take over the world, where X is vaccines, digital currency, electric vehicles, elections that they don't win, LGBTQ+ folks existing, Black folks surviving and thriving, abortion, and gas stoves. Probably fluoride too.
Meanwhile, the actual effects are pretty well detailed, documented and predictable. It's getting worse, and it's getting worse at a faster rate.
Plan accordingly.
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