Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists
Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists
If the anomaly does not stabilise by August, ‘the world will be in uncharted territory’, says climate expert
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.
This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5C benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.
The UK Met Office previously predicted the 1.5C goal could be surpassed over the period of a year and other leading climate monitoring organisations said the current levels of heating remain within the bounds anticipated by computer models.
Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted that temperature records are being broken each month by up to 0.2C.
“It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” the successor to Jim Hansen wrote in a recent article for Nature.
“Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The original article contains 657 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Y'know, big tinfoil hat time since conspiracies are really hard to keep, but if I was a climate scientist who wanted people to take climate change more seriously, (as we certainly should!) it wouldn't be a horrible strategy to try and get everyone on board to underpredict. Exceeding the worst case prediction definitely adds a sense of direness that might not be there if things were just going exactly as they'd predicted.
Of course, I don't actually think that's the case, because it'd be nearly impossible to make such a large conspiracy without it leaking, but if there was ever a global conspiracy to try to save humankind, that'd make for a good one.