A person rides a bike during autumn season at Saddle River County Park in Bergen County, New Jersey, on Oct. 28, 2023.
his October was the hottest on record globally, 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average for the month — and the fifth straight month with such a mark in what will now almost certainly be the warmest year ever recorded.
October was a whopping 0.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous record for the month in 2019, surprising even Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European climate agency that routinely publishes monthly bulletins observing global surface air and sea temperatures, among other data.After the cumulative warming of these past several months, it’s virtually guaranteed that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, according to Copernicus.
“This is a clear sign that we are going into a climate regime that will have more impact on more people," Schlosser said. “We better take this warning that we actually should have taken 50 years ago or more and draw the right conclusions.”This year has been so exceptionally hot in part because oceans have been warming, which means they are doing less to counteract global warming than in the past.
Schlosser said that means the world should expect more records to be broken as a result of that warming, but the question is whether they will come in smaller steps going forward. He added that the planet is already exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since pre-industrial times that the Paris agreement was aimed at capping, and that the planet hasn't yet seen the full impact of that warming.
“It's so much more expensive to keep burning these fossil fuels than it would be to stop doing it. That’s basically what it shows,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “And of course, you don’t see that when you just look at the records being broken and not at the people and systems that are suffering, but that — that is what matters.”TIME may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.