2023: year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis
Heat death: This Site reported in 2020 that the far north had experienced its hottest temperatures ever, with fires breaking out across the world.
As far as This Writer is concerned, the case for climate change was proved when I woke up on Christmas morning and discovered the temperature was 10C.
That’s more like spring, or early autumn, than the depths of winter!
Now we see scientists saying last year – 2023 – was the time when human beings proved we can’t tackle the climate crisis responsibly.
According to them, as quoted in The Guardian:
“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”
That should be enough to prove that bribable politicians need to be taken away from the issue.
After what was probably the hottest July in 120,000 years, [former NASA scientist James] Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years.
“The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.
His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.
Scientists are still processing data from this blistering year. The latest to state it will be a record was the Japanese meteorological agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 at 0.53C above the global average between 1991 and 2020.
This was far above the previous record set in 2016, when temperatures were 0.35C above that average. Over the longer term, the world is about 1.2C hotter than in preindustrial times.
Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will almost certainly prove to have been 1.5C higher than preindustrial levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual measurements, many scientists say it is probably only a matter of time before the world overshoots the most ambitious of the Paris agreement targets.
Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.
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