The boreal summer (summer in the Northern Hemisphere) of 2023 – technically understood as the months of June, July and August – happens to occupy, prominently, the first place in the list of the warmest quarters that have been recorded so far on the planet as a whole, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Center for Medium-Term Weather Forecasts (Copernicus Program) of the European Union.
The June-July-August (JJA) season of 2023 was the warmest on record in the world by a wide margin, with an average temperature of 16.77°C, i.e. 0.66°C above average , details the newsletter published by Copernicus. The S3C refers to data recorded by modern temperature monitoring systems, i.e. for approximately the last 100 years (for some stations and satellite data, the period is shorter).
"The average European summer temperature was 19.63°C, 0.83°C above average, the fifth warmest of the summer season. JJA 2023 has seen record anomalies in sea surface temperature (SST) in the North Atlantic and the global ocean”.
August 2023 was the warmest August on record globally and warmer than all other months except July 2023, according to the C3S bulletin.
The global mean surface air temperature of 16.82°C for August 2023 was 0.71°C warmer than the August 1991-2020 average and 0.31°C warmer warmer than the warmest August prior to 2016.
It is estimated that the month was around 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial average for the period 1850-1900. Heat waves have been present this summer in multiple regions of the Northern Hemisphere, including southern Europe, the southern United States and Japan.
Temperatures well above average were recorded in Australia, several countries in South America and around much of Antarctica, Copernicus said.
Simultaneously, and with a clear relationship, the surface water and sea air temperatures were well above average in some other regions. The global temperature anomaly for the first eight months of 2023 (January-August) ranks as the second warmest on record, just 0.01°C below 2016, currently the warmest year.
According to Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, “Global temperature records will continue to fall in 2023, and the warmest August followed the warmest July and June, leading to the warmest boreal summer on record of data We go back to 1940. Currently, 2023 is ranked as the second warmest, with only 0.01°C less than 2016 with four months left in the year.
Meanwhile, the global ocean recorded its warmest daily surface temperature on record in August, making it the warmest month on record. "The scientific evidence is overwhelming: we will continue to see more climate records and more intense and frequent extreme climate events that will impact society and ecosystems, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases."
Based on the Copernicus report, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, published a statement in which he stated that "climate collapse has begun".
"Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather phenomena affecting every corner of the planet", added Guterres, who recalled how "scientists started warning us a long time ago about the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels".
Guterres' advisor on the climate issue, Selwin Hart, participated yesterday at the Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi (Kenya), where he called for "climate justice". "The impacts will increase - he said - and we are already witnessing how these impacts will disproportionately affect countries and regions such as Africa. An injustice, because these corners of the world are the ones that have contributed the least to the climate crisis".
