Record heat and catastrophic climate events marked 2023, and according to climate scientists across the world, 2024 will probably exceed those dangerous records. The New York Times' Raymond Zhong reports:
"Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and very likely the past 125,000.
Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged across Canada. Flooding in Libya killed thousands. Wintertime ice cover in the dark seas around Antarctica was at unprecedented lows.
This year’s global temperatures did not just beat prior records. They left them in the dust. From June through November, the mercury spent month after month soaring off the charts. December’s temperatures have largely remained above normal: Much of the Northeastern United States is expecting springlike conditions this week.
That is why scientists are already sifting through evidence — from oceans, volcanic eruptions, even pollution from cargo ships — to see whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and what we are doing to it.
One hypothesis, perhaps the most troubling, is that the planet’s warming is accelerating, that the effects of climate change are barreling our way more quickly than before. 'What we’re looking for, really, is a bunch of corroborating evidence that all points in the same direction,' said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds. 'Then we’re looking for causality. And that will be really interesting.'” (our emphasis)
Scientists are looking at El Niño impacts to help gauge how much acceleration in warming there will be in 2024, and also at the distribution of extreme heat across the globe to measure human causality. In any event, no one is expecting the advent of a new ice age, with the impact of burning fossil fuels continuing to shroud the Earth in greenhouse gases. We may have already passed the point of no return in terms of curbing the warming climate, but we have to keep pushing for the reduction in carbon emissions and for the adoption of clean energy alternatives and energy conservation to level off these annual spikes in temperature.
