It's no longer a secret, but our planet, the Earth, is suffering the full brunt of the consequences of the industrial revolution. With an explosion in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the Earth is warming up, a lot and fast. This global warming, the consequences of which are visible almost everywhere on Earth, can be explained above all by one reason: human activity.
It is now a scientific certainty that extremely polluting human activity over the last 150 years has destroyed the earth's ecosystem to the point of dragging our planet into a hellish cycle of large-scale warming. The latest reports from climatologists predict an increase of +4°C compared to 1850, a real catastrophe which endangers the very existence of the human species.
But even more worrying is that this global warming is not linear, it seems to be accelerating. For 18 months, all the meters have been panicking. The planet is warming at an “inexplicable” rate. Even Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute, doesn't understand the current situation.
Scientists lack explanation
Every year, he and his colleagues formulate predictions about the global climate in the coming year. But for 2023, he and his team have completely missed the boat. Their forecasts turned out to be 0.2°C too low. This may seem like an acceptable margin of error, but for climatologists of this caliber, it amounts to saying that 2 +2=3.
It is this enormous gap between the forecasts and the data collected by NASA that worries Gavin Schmidt. Because this means that part of the earth's warming is still “of unknown origin”. A tough way to question themselves for NASA scientists who today find themselves faced with a dilemma.
“Either we missed an important warming factor, or we underestimated the rate of warming.” For their calculations for the year 2023, in addition to taking into account pollution caused by humans, scientists added to their calculation the presence of El Niño, a natural marine current which warms the waters of the Pacific.
NASA had even made calculations concerning the explosion of the Hunga Tonga volcano (on the archipelago of the same name) which could have warmed the atmosphere on a small scale. Nothing had been left to chance, and the cycle of the Sun, currently very strong, had also been taken into account in the calculation model of the American space agency.
El Nino, the ideal culprit?
While Gavin Schmidt wonders about the origin of this “additional warming”, a scientific article could provide a first element of answer. Published in the prestigious journal Science, it highlights the warming effect of El Niño. According to this study, it would have been much stronger than expected, leading climatologists to make calculation errors.
Scientists have even found a precedent capable of explaining this difference between predicted and observed temperatures. In 1977, after years of La Nina (the other Pacific sea current which cools the water), El Niño was particularly violent, causing the global temperature to rise by a few tenths of a degree.
If this explanation is not an end in itself, it provides a first element of response. It will be interesting to monitor the predictions of climate scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for the coming years, to see if their model should be called into question, or if 2023 was simply an exceptional year.
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