Hello,
The intense northern hemisphere summer heat that drove wildfires across the Mediterranean, buckled roads in Texas and strained power grids in China last year made it not just the warmest summer since official records began – but the warmest in some 2,000 years, new research suggests.
But before we dive in, please note that Sustainable Switch will be on a short break next week, and back in your inbox on May 28.
Now, back to the new work published in the journal Nature which suggests 2023 eclipsed temperatures over a far longer timeline than official records show – a finding established by looking at meteorological records dating to the mid-1800s and temperature data based on the analysis of tree rings across nine northern sites.
“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” said study co-author Jan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.
Last year’s summer season temperatures on lands between 30 and 90 degrees north latitude reached 2.07 degrees Celsius (3.73 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial averages, the study said.
Based on tree ring data, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.
This comes as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that some 60.5% of the world’s reef area has been subjected to heat stress bad enough to trigger bleaching over the past year.
“I am very worried about the state of the world’s coral reefs,” NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator Derek Manzello said in a monthly briefing. “We are seeing (ocean temperatures) play out right now that are very extreme in nature”.
Click here for the full Reuters story on coral bleaching.
