(CN) — Last year was the warmest on average since at least 1880, according to a report NASA released Friday.
Compared to the years between 1951 and 1980, the space agency's "baseline period" for tracking global surface temperatures, 2023 was 1.2 degrees Celsius, or 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit, above average.
And compared to global averages recorded in the late 1800s, last year was warmer by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.4 degrees Celsius.
This is a major blow to the international climate goals set down in the 2015 Paris Accords, which sought to limit global warming to 2, ideally 1.5, degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. Global warming above those thresholds, according to NASA and other climate observers, likely will result in "dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change," including extreme heat, drought, storms and wildfires affecting different areas of the globe simultaneously.
Developing countries in the global south are especially susceptible to climate disasters. The effects of global warming are already worsening the inequality between wealthy and poor nations, a 2019 Stanford University study found, while a 2021 report from the UN named climate change as a factor increasing the risk of famine for up to 41 million people in Africa, Southwest Asia and South America.
A year ago to the day, officials from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration augured that global warming would exceed the Paris limits by the end of the decade.
“NASA and NOAA’s global temperature report confirms what billions of people around the world experienced last year; we are facing a climate crisis,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a prepared statement Friday. “From extreme heat, to wildfires, to rising sea levels, we can see our Earth is changing,"
Data from NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies showed that July 2023 in particular was the planet's hottest month since 1880, though the agency also pointed out that "each month from June through December set a global record for the respective month."
The extreme heat in 2023 caught even climate experts by surprise, the institute's director Gavin Schmidt said in an email, based on observation of the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
From 2020 to 2022 the Pacific was in a La Niña phase of its natural temperature oscillation cycle, meaning sea surface temperatures trended cooler and had a very slight chilling effect — less than one degree Celsius — on the global average temperature. But last May the ocean began transitioning to its warmer phase, El Niño.
Typically, the effects of an El Niño cycle are most pronounced during the months of February, March and April. But the record heat of 2023 occurred well before the expected El Niño peak this spring.
"We expected a warm, but not really exceptional year based on the (still) La Niña to neutral conditions we started with," Schmidt said. "Obviously, that was not how it turned out."
Schmidt added in a separate, prepared statement that “the exceptional warming that we’re experiencing is not something we’ve seen before in human history,” citing global reliance on fossil fuels as the primary driver of climate change.
NASA similarly named "human activity" as the main cause of global warming, but did not list any specific industries or actors responsible.
The agency's institutional neutrality is not shared by numerous environmental activists and scientists around the globe, who have increasingly targeted energy corporations and capitalism itself, rather than individuals' activity, as the main culprits behind climate change.
A study published in the online academic journal Science last year, for example, accused oil giant ExxonMobil of internally predicting climate change as early as the 1970s, but hiding their findings from the public. An additional study known as the Carbon Majors Report, published in 2017 by environmental charity CDP, found that just 100 fossil fuel producers, including ExxonMobil, were responsible for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions from 1988 to 2015.
An independent research agency known as The Rhodium Group also released a report on Wednesday finding that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions declined by 1.9% in 2023. The group called the reduction a "step in the right direction," while noting "that rate of decline needs to more than triple and sustain at that level every year from 2024 through 2030 in order to meet the US’s climate target under the Paris Agreement of a 50-52% reduction in emissions."
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