NASA recently admitted that climate prediction models were not able to predict warming particularly marked planetary impact observed during the year 2023.
Exceptional warming in 2023
The year 2023 was the hottest on Earth since weather records began. The temperature anomaly has indeed flirted with the symbolic threshold of +1.5°C warming compared to the pre-industrial era.
Heat: the number of days of “heat stress” has reached records in Europe in 2023
In fact, global average temperatures over the year reached 14.98°Cor an anomaly of +1.48°C compared to this period, largely beating (+0.17°C) the old record established during the year 2016.
Scientists expected significant warming in 2023, but not of this intensity. The warming was in fact greater than +0.2°C to what climate models had predicted. Even if this may seem insignificant, such a gap with forecasts is enormous on a planetary scale, the most important between predictions and reality for 40 years according to NASA.
Good news: NASA has re-established contact with the Voyager 1 probe!
This difference between predictions and reality is worrying according to climatologists, particularly in relation to the fact thatno other year before had defied predictions so much. As a reminder, in addition to record air temperatures, our oceans are also overheating, with average temperatures reaching records for over a year now.
How to explain such a difference ?
According to researchers, several factors would have led to such a significant increase in global temperatures during the year 2023. Global warming linked to greenhouse gas emissions has of course a significant weight in the balancethis even seems to have increased since the start of the 21st century in many regions.
However, other parameters must also be taken into account. The global climate phenomenon El Niñohaving reached a peak of intensity in 2023 has also contributed to the rise in global temperatures, this type of phenomenon having a tendency to generate a temporary increase in temperatures across the world, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans.
The eruption of the Hunga Tunga volcano in 2022 was also able to play a non-negligible role, particularly due to the large quantities of water vapour that it ejected into the atmosphere, this gas being one of the main greenhouse gases. Finally, the reduction of certain pollutants which blocked the sky and the solar cycle could also be parameters having favored this sudden warming according to scientists.
Alert: Coral reefs on the verge of a global crisis. When will it strike? What consequences?
However, NASA climatologists do not rule out that the significant warming observed in 2023 was a simple occasional climatic anomaly, combined with all the factors mentioned above, notably El Niño. In any case, if the temperature anomaly compared to forecasts does not resolve by summer with the end of El Niño and the return of La Niña, we will then enter in the realm of the unknown in terms of global warming, which is far from good news.
