Before you say goodbye to 2023, the United Nations broke the most disheartening news at the COP28 Summit in Duabi, reporting 2023 to be the hottest year ever recorded. The global temperature is set at around 1.4 Celsius (2.5F), which is above the pre-industrial average, according to the WMO’s Provisional State of the Global Climate Report 2023.
As the COP28 Climate Summit initiated, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced the data to the world nations and said, “Record global heating should send shivers down the spines of world leaders, and it should trigger them to act,” adding, “We are living through climate collapse in real time, and the impact is devastating.”
In the first half of 2024, the agency plans to release its final State of the Global Climate 2023 report. However, it stated that the difference between the first ten months of this year and the previous two years — 2016, and 2020 — “is such that the final two months are very unlikely to affect the ranking.”
Some of this year’s record heat can be attributed to El Nio, a cyclical phenomenon characterized by the warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, which typically leads to higher temperatures and shifts in weather patterns in many parts of the world. However, some of the areas that experienced unusually high temperatures, such as the Northeast Atlantic, do not correspond to typical El Nio patterns, according to the report.
