the average global temperature since January is 1.4°C warmer than in the pre-industrial era, Copernicus announces

“September 2023 was the hottest September ever recorded globally”, beating the previous record by an “extraordinary” margin, the European observatory also announced.

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Faced with intense heat, a passerby shades herself under an umbrella on October 2, 2023 in Paris.  (MAGALI COHEN / HANS LUCAS / AFP)

The year 2023 is approaching the 1.5°C mark of the Paris agreement. After an unprecedented summer and an even more alarming month of September, 2023 is now the hottest year ever measured over the first nine months. From January to September, “the global average temperature is 1.40°C above the pre-industrial average (1850-1900)”before global warming caused by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, the climate change service (C3S) of the European Copernicus Observatory announced Thursday, October 5.

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And this average, already 0.05°C higher than for the record year of 2016, could further increase over the last three months of the year, given the strengthening of El Nino. This cyclical weather phenomenon over the Pacific, synonymous with additional warming, generally peaks around the Christmas period. “It is not certain that 2023 will reach 1.5°C. But we are quite close”declared Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S.

Reaching this symbolic bar would not mean that the most ambitious limit of the Paris agreement has been reached, because the latter refers to the evolution of the climate over long periods, decades and not single years. The IPCC, bringing together climate experts mandated by the United Nations, predicts that this threshold of 1.5°C will be reached by the years 2030-2035. And the World Meteorological Organization estimated in the spring that the bar would be crossed for the first time in a full year only in the next five years.

September 2023, the hottest ever measured

Waiting for, “September 2023 was the hottest September on record globally”, continuing a series of monthly world records that began in June. July 2023 holds the absolute record, all months combined. With an average temperature of 16.38°C on the surface of the globe, the past month exceeds the record of September 2020 by a margin “extraordinary” of 0.5°C, reported Copernicus. September 2023 is like this “1.75°C warmer than the average September over the period 1850-1900”added Copernicus.


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