"Gobsmackingly bananas."
"Uncharted territories."
“The writing is so clearly on the wall."
Last month shattered the record for the hottest September on record by such a wide margin that climate scientists say it was almost beyond belief.
The September milestone, reported in new data released late Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, added to an alarming stretch of record-breaking global temperatures. During June, July and August, the planet had its hottest summer on record “by a large margin.”
September's temperatures have climate scientists even more stunned.
“This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for the financial services company Stripe, wrote Tuesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said it’s worrying to see so many new records set, but it’s even more alarming to see by what margin they are being toppled. Average surface air temperatures last month were almost a degree Fahrenheit hotter than September 2020, which had been the warmest September on record.
“Normally when you’re beating a record, it’s by hundredths of a degree,” she said, “so this is really a huge amount.”
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September was also the most anomalously warm month in recorded history, meaning its deviation from the average was higher than any month so far, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
That warmth has continued into October. Temperatures around the world have remained elevated with a resurgence of summerlike conditions gripping residents of the Upper Midwest and the Northeast this week, despite being almost two full weeks into fall.
Record-smashing temperatures — above 90 F in some places — added to unseasonable warmth across a huge swath of the country, with cities from the Great Lakes to the Northeast experiencing high temperatures 10 to 30 degrees above average.
But the United States was hardly alone with its wild temperature swings: An October heat wave is baking Western Europe, with temperatures soaring well above 90 F in parts of France and Spain. And in the Southern Hemisphere, unseasonably warm temperatures have been recorded across South America and Australia, all coming on the heels of multiple bouts of extreme heat in previous months, during what should have been the winter season in that part of the world.
It's the kind of topsy-turvy warming trend that has left climate scientists bewildered.
“We have to find in our brains a new awareness for what ‘extreme’ means today, and just how horrifying that word is going to continue to be when our baseline is changing so quickly,” said Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University.
For researchers like Cobb who pay close attention to extremes, 2023 already has them in spades.
Month after month of warmer-than-usual conditions have put 2023 on track to become the hottest year ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set in 2016.
“It’s looking like it’s a virtual lock,” Cobb said of the problematic honor.
This trajectory of global warming has been predicted in climate models, but the pace of change has surprised many scientists.
"Most, if not all, climate scientists had a feeling that the next two years were going to be pretty warm, but I think everyone has been a little surprised just how warm globally it has been," said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Princeton University.
Warm conditions both this year and in 2016 were boosted by El Niño, a natural climate pattern characterized by warmer than usual waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. El Nińo can impact weather conditions around the world and the phenomenon typically compounds background warming from human-caused climate change.
In a warming world, that means El Niño events are more likely to “push temperatures into ever more uncharted territories,” Cobb said.
El Niño conditions are expected to persist into 2024. That could mean more records broken next year, but Burgess said it’s too early to make any reliable forecasts of that nature. Still, events that have unfolded this year — devastating floods in multiple continents, weeks of unrelenting heat waves and some of the most catastrophic wildfires ever seen, to name a few — offer a concerning outlook.
“It really makes me very nervous of what’s to come,” Burgess said.
Burgess and others said the current situation should be a wake-up call for policymakers on the need to take immediate action to avert the most devastating consequences of climate change.
And while conditions and temperatures will fluctuate in the coming years, it's impossible to ignore the outsize impact of human-caused global warming, according to Cobb.
“The writing is so clearly on the wall,” she said. “We have our foot all the way down on the accelerator in terms of our emissions, and we’re basically not able to keep up with the changes that are occurring today, let alone the continued warming and extreme impacts that we know are coming down the pike.”
