2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory
BioScience published this free special report in October 2023.
Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.
Climate-related all-time records
In 2023, we witnessed an extraordinary series of climate-related records being broken around the world. The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected (Armstrong McKay et al. 2022, Ripple et al. 2023). This year, exceptional heat waves have swept across the world, leading to record high temperatures. The oceans have been historically warm, with global and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures both breaking records and unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica (figure 1a–1d). In addition, June through August of this year was the warmest period ever recorded, and in early July, we witnessed Earth’s highest global daily average surface temperature ever measured, possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years (figure 1e). It is a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.