This year is “virtually certain” to be the warmest in 125,000 years, according to European Union experts, after data revealed that last month was the world’s warmest October in that period.
The previous October temperature record, set in 2019, was surpassed by a wide margin last month, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Wednesday.
“The record was broken by 0.4 degrees Celsius,” C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess stated, describing the October temperature anomaly as “very extreme.”
The heat is caused by continued glasshouse gas emissions, as well as the emergence of the El Nino weather trend this year, which warms the surface waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Globally, the average surface air temperature in October was 1.7 degrees Celsius higher than the same month in the pre-industrial period, defined by Copernicus.
The record-breaking October implies that 2023 is now “virtually certain” to be the warmest year on record, according to C3S.
The previous record was set in 2016 during another El Nino year. Copernicus’ dataset dates from 1940.
“When we combine our data with the IPCC, then we can say that this is the warmest year for the last 125,000 years,” Burgess said.
The UN climate science panel IPCC’s longer-term data includes measurements from ice cores, tree rings, and coral deposits.
The only other time a month broke the temperature record by such a big margin before October was in September 2023.
Climate change is causing increasingly catastrophic extremes. Floods in Libya killed hundreds of people this year, as did catastrophic heatwaves in South America and Canada’s worst wildfire season on record.
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