The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event.
Last year was about 1.48C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU’s climate service says.
Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, BBC analysis shows.
Sea surface temperatures have also smashed previous highs.
The Met Office reported last week that the UK experienced its second warmest year on record in 2023.
These global records are bringing the world closer to breaching key international climate targets.
“What struck me was not just that [2023] was record-breaking, but the amount by which it broke previous records,” notes Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.
The margin of some of these records – which you can see on the chart below – is “really astonishing”, Prof Dessler says, considering they are averages across the whole world.
Multiple line chart showing daily average global air temperature, with a line for each year between 1940 and 2023. The 2023 line is far above any previous level for much of the second half of the year.
It’s well-known that the world is much warmer now than 100 years ago, as humans keep releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But 12 months ago, no major science body actually predicted 2023 being the hottest year on record, because of the complicated way in which the Earth’s climate behaves.
During the first few months of the year, only a small number of days broke air temperature records.
But the world then went on a remarkable, almost unbroken streak of daily records in the second half of 2023.
