2023 Will Be Remembered as the Year Climate Change Arrived

This summer 80 million Americans were experiencing 105-degree heat. And tonight the Washington Post identifies what was unique about 2023's weather: "the heat's all-consuming relentlessness. "It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared..."Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era - an age of "global boiling," as United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, November 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels. Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records. In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it "mind-boggling." The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600. In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce... At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub... One explanation for 2023's extreme heat is El Nino - a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year's heat - amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels - is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there's not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat. That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame. This year, then, will wind up as the first - and almost surely not the last - in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid. The article includes two more sobering statistics:"The University of Maine's Climate Change Institute logs daily global temperatures going back to 1940. From this July on, almost without fail, every daily temperature in 2023 topped the daily temperature from the same date in any of the prior 83 years.""In Brazil, the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon's main tributaries, fell to its lowest level since record keeping began more than a century earlier."

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