"Record temperatures in 2023 give an alarm signal"/ DW: What is causing global warming! Risk of more casualties and damage from extreme weather

October 2023 worldwide was the hottest month ever recorded. According to the EU's climate change service Copernicus, the average global surface temperature was 1.7 degrees above the average temperature estimated for October before the start of industrialization (reference period 1850-1900).

Since June of this year, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has been measuring new record temperatures every month: followed by the month considered the hottest - July, August, September and now October - of all time. That November and December 2023 will record record temperatures again, this is already considered safe. Not only in the air, but also the surface temperature of the seas this year is announced as a record value.

"We can say with great certainty that 2023 is the warmest year since temperature records began, and we are now 1.43 degrees above the pre-industrial average," says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S. Together with data from the IPCC climate council, it turns out that October 2023 was "the hottest October in more than 125,000 years", writes Burgess on the Linkedin internet platform. Unlike C3S, the IPCC also refers to the measurement values ??of ice rods that are extracted by drilling glaciers, tree rings and calcifications in corals.

Greenhouse emissions at record levels

Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo says it is clear that "this year's record temperatures give an alarm signal!" To minimize the risk of a warming world, greenhouse gas emissions must be radically reduced - "and this must happen very quickly. We must make better use of the knowledge we possess and our policies and habits and ways of behavior must adapt to this necessity," says Buontempo in a conversation with DW.

As one of the causes for the hot year 2023, the high emissions of the greenhouse effect through combustion from the use of fossil energy are considered. In 2022 they reached a record high worldwide, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Carbon dioxide CO2 emissions alone, according to these data, have been about 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, and they will increase even further in 2023.

Currently, large listed companies are slowing down their decarbonization measures, as shown by the Net-Zero-Tracker – an analysis of MSCI data entrepreneurship. There is a risk that for this reason there will be more emissions than the 1.5 degree that is the permissible objective, it is further stated.

According to the latest annual report of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the 20 most important oil and gas producing countries, including the USA, China, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, plan to produce even more by 2030. a lot of oil, gas and coal, which could consequently lead to global warming above 2 degrees.

"El-Niño" only partially responsible for 2023's record temperatures

2023 is also the year of the so-called "El-Niño" phenomenon. This recurring weather phenomenon has caused the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean to warm in the eastern part. However, this year's record temperatures cannot be explained only by the "El-Niño" phenomenon, the director of Copernicus Buontempo tells DW.

"Of the temperature signals, only a part is related to the region of the "El-Niño" phenomenon, the other larger part comes from other regions. What happened this year in Canada, the USA or Europe has nothing to do with "El -Niño" but with man-made climate change." This year, many countries in Europe and North America again faced record heat and massive forest fires.

The objective of not allowing global warming by more than 1.5 degrees at current rates seems to be difficult to achieve. But if this objective is not achieved, there is a risk of consequences in many directions. The number of heat deaths in the future could increase by 370 percent - even if the increase in the global average temperature remained below 2 degrees. This was pointed out by researchers in a new report in the scientific journal "The Lancet".

More casualties and damage from extreme weather

Around the world, people today face twice as much extreme heat than in the period 1986 to 2005. Increasing heat means that people work less or exercise less outdoors. In Germany, for example in 2022 there were 34 million less working hours due to the heat. The heat around the world also increases the risk of fires and the spread of tropical infectious diseases.

But also extreme rainfall, which is becoming more frequent due to human-caused climate change, creates victims and damages with floods and floods that destroy infrastructure and agriculture./ DW