A new study has concluded that the extreme heat experienced in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer of 2023, which caused wildfires in the Mediterranean region, road collapses in Texas, and stress on electricity grids in China, not only made last summer the hottest on record but also the hottest in about 2000 years. This striking discovery was part of one of two new studies published yesterday, amid ongoing rising global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists were quick to announce that the period from June to August of last year was the hottest since the beginning of temperature recordings in the 1940s. A new study published in the scientific journal Nature indicates that the heat of 2023 exceeded temperatures over a much longer timeframe, a finding substantiated by examining weather records dating back to the mid-19th century and tree-ring temperature data from nine sites in the Northern Hemisphere.
Jan Esper, a co-author of the study and a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, stated, "When you look at the long history, you can see how tragic the modern phenomenon of global warming is." The study indicated that summer temperatures last year in regions between latitude 30 and 90 degrees north were 2.07 degrees Celsius (3.73 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages.
According to tree-ring data, the summer months of 2023 were on average 2.2 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the estimated average temperature from the year 1 AD to 1890. The result was not entirely surprising; by January, scientists at the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service stated that 2023 was "very likely" to be the hottest year in about 100,000 years. However, researcher Esper noted that proving such a long record is unlikely. He, along with two other European scientists, argued in a research paper last year that year-to-year comparisons over such a wide timeframe using current scientific methods, including collecting temperature data from sources like marine deposits or peat bogs, are not feasible.
Esper remarked, "We don't have such data; it's an exaggeration." He added that the extreme heat experienced last summer was exacerbated by the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which typically coincides with warmer global temperatures, leading to "longer and more intense heatwaves and prolonged droughts."
